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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Law’s Lumber Room (Second Series), by Francis Watt
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The Law’s Lumber Room (Second Series)
-
-Author: Francis Watt
-
-Release Date: October 28, 2017 [eBook #55839]
-[Most recently updated: October 9, 2021]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: deaurider, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAW’S LUMBER ROOM (2ND SERIES) ***
-
-
-
-
-The Law’s Lumber Room
-
-
-
-
-The rusty curb of old father antic--the law
-
-                                   FALSTAFF
-
-
-
-
-  The Law’s
-  Lumber
-  Room
-
-  By
-  Francis
-  Watt
-
-  Second Series
-
-  John Lane, The Bodley Head
-  London and New York
-  mdcccxcviii
-
-
-
-
-  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
-  At the Ballantyne Press
-
-
-
-
-Prefatory
-
-
-_This is an entirely distinct book from the first series of the Law’s
-Lumber Room. The subjects are of more general interest, they are
-treated with greater fulness of detail, most are as much literary as
-legal; but I have thought it best to retain the old name. No other
-seemed so briefly and so truly descriptive of papers which tell what
-the law and its ways once were, and what they have ceased, one may
-reasonably suppose, for ever to be._
-
-_I make two remarks. There is a great deal of hanging in this book;
-that is only because those were hanging times. The law had no thought
-of mending the criminal; it ended him in the most summary fashion. The
-death of the chief actors was as inevitably the finish of the story as
-it is in a modern French novel._
-
-_Again, in pondering those memories of the past, one realises how much,
-in other things than mechanical invention, our time is unlike all that
-went before. This is not the commonplace it seems, for not easily do we
-realise how far the change has gone._
-
-              _Under the sway
-  Of Death, the past’s enormous disarray
-  Lies hushed and dark._
-
-_Details such as make up this volume have this merit: they bring the
-antique world before us, and the net result seems to be this: we lead
-better lives, we are more just and charitable, perhaps less selfish
-than our forefathers, but how to deny that something is lost? for life
-is not so exciting, and our annals are anything but picturesque._
-
-_These papers were originally published in_ The New Review, The Yellow
-Book, _and_ The Ludgate. _I have made very considerable additions to
-most of them, and all have been carefully revised._
-
-
-
-
-Contents
-
-
-                                      PAGE
-
-  TYBURN TREE                            1
-
-  PILLORY AND CART’S TAIL               45
-
-  STATE TRIALS FOR WITCHCRAFT           68
-
-  A PAIR OF PARRICIDES                  88
-
-  SOME DISUSED ROADS TO MATRIMONY      116
-
-  THE BORDER LAW                       152
-
-  THE SERJEANT-AT-LAW                  185
-
-
-
-
-Tyburn Tree
-
-    Its Exact Position not known--Near the Marble Arch--Fanciful
-    Etymologies--The Last Days of the Old-Time Criminal--Robert Dowe’s
-    Bequest--Execution Eve--St. Sepulchre’s Bell--The Procession--St.
-    Giles’s Bowl--At Tyburn--Ketch’s Perquisites--The Newgate
-    Ordinary--The Executioner--Tyburn’s Roll of Fame--Catholic
-    Martyrs--Cromwell’s Head--The Highwaymen--Lord Ferrers--Dr.
-    Dodd--James Hackman--Tyburn in English Letters.
-
-
-To-day you cannot fix the exact spot where Tyburn Tree raised its
-uncanny form. To the many it was the most noteworthy thing about Old
-London, yet while thousands who had gazed thereon in fascinated horror
-were still in life, a certain vagueness was evident in men’s thoughts,
-and, albeit antiquaries have keenly debated the _locus_, all the mind
-is clouded with a doubt, and your carefully worked out conclusion is
-but guesswork. There is reason manifold for this. Of old time the
-populous district known as Tyburnia was wild heath intersected by
-the Tyburn Brook, which, rising near Hampstead, crossed what is now
-Oxford Street, hard by the Marble Arch, and so on to Chelsea and the
-Thames. Somewhere on its banks was the Middlesex gallows. It may be
-that as the tide set westward the site was changed. Again, the wild
-heath is now thick with houses; new streets and squares have confused
-the ancient landmarks; those who dwelt therein preferred that there
-should not be a too nice identification of localities. How startling
-the reflection that in the very place of your dining-room, thousands
-of fellow-creatures had dangled in their last agonies! How rest at
-ease in such a chamber of horrors? The weight of evidence favours (or
-disfavours) No. 49 Connaught Square. The Bishop of London is ground
-landlord here; and it is said that in the lease of that house granted
-by him the fact is recorded that there stood the “Deadly Never-Green.”
-Such a record were purely gratuitous, but the draftsman may have
-made it to fix the identity of the dwelling. But to-day the Square
-runs but to No. 47. Some shuffling of numerals has, you fancy, taken
-place to baffle indiscreet research. However, you may be informed (in
-confidence) that you have but to stand at the south-east corner of the
-Square to be “warm,” as children say in their games.
-
-Let these minutiæ go. Tyburn Tree stood within a gunshot to the
-north-west of the Marble Arch. Its pictured shape is known from
-contemporary prints. There were three tall uprights, joined at the
-top by three cross-beams, the whole forming a triangle. It could
-accommodate many patients at once, and there is some authority for
-supposing that the beam towards Paddington was specially used for Roman
-Catholics. In the last century the nicer age objected to it as an
-eyesore; and it was replaced by a movable structure, fashioned of two
-uprights and a cross-beam, which was set up in the Edgware Road at the
-corner of Bryanston Street, and which, the grim work done, was stored
-in the corner house, from whose windows the sheriffs superintended
-executions. To accommodate genteel spectators there were just such
-stands as you find on a racecourse, the seats whereof were let at
-divers prices, according to the interest excited. In 1758, for Dr.
-Henesey’s execution as arch-traitor, the rate rose to two shillings and
-two and sixpence a seat. The Doctor was “most provokingly reprieved,”
-whereat the mob in righteous indignation arose and wrecked the stands.
-Mammy Douglas, a woman who kept the key of one of these stands, was
-popularly known as “the Tyburn pew-opener.”
-
-Fanciful etymologists played mad pranks with the name. In Fuller’s
-_Worthies, Tieburne_ is derived on vague authority from “Tie” and
-“Burne,” because the “poor Lollards” there “had their necks _tied_ to
-the beame and their lower parts _burnt_ in the fire. Others” (he goes
-on more sensibly) “will have it called from _Twa_ and _Burne_, that
-is two rivulets, which it seems meet near the place.” And then it was
-plainly a _Bourn_ whence no traveller returned! Most probably it is a
-shortened form of _The_, or _At the Aye Bourne_ (= _’t Aye-bourne_ =
-_Tyburn_) or Brook already denoted. Tyburn was not always London’s
-sole or even principal place of execution. In early times people were
-hanged as well as burned at Smithfield. The elms at St. Giles’s were
-far too handy a provision to stay idle. At Tower Green was the chosen
-spot for beheading your high-class criminal, and it was common to put
-off a malefactor on the very theatre of his malefaction. There are few
-spots in Old London which have not carried a gallows at one or other
-time. Some think that certain elm-trees suggested the choice of Tyburn.
-In the end it proved the most convenient of all, being neither too near
-nor too far; and in the end its name came to have (as is common with
-such words) a general application, and was applied at York, Liverpool,
-Dublin, and elsewhere, to the place of execution.
-
-To-day the criminal’s progress from cell to gallows is an affair of a
-few minutes. To an earlier time this had savoured of indecent haste.
-Then, the way to Tyburn, long in itself, was lengthened out by the
-observance of a complicated ritual, some of it of ancient origin. Let
-us follow “the poor inhabitant below” from the dock to the rope. To
-understand what follows one must remember that two distinct sets of
-forces acted on his mind:--on the one hand, the gloom of the prison,
-the priest’s advice, the memory of mis-spent days, the horror of
-doom; on the other, the reaction of a lawless nature against a cruel
-code, the resolve to die game, the flattering belief that he was the
-observed of all observers, and perhaps a secret conviction that the
-unknown could be no worse than the known. According as the one set or
-other prevailed he was penitent or brazen, the Ordinary’s darling or
-the people’s joy. Well, his Lordship having assumed the black cap and
-pronounced sentence of death, the convict was forthwith removed to the
-condemned hold in Newgate. There he was heavily fettered, and, if of
-any renown as a prison-breaker, chained to a ring in the ground. Escape
-was not hopeless. Friends were allowed to visit and supply him with
-money, wherewith he might bribe his keepers; and the prison discipline,
-though cruel, was incredibly lax (Jack Sheppard’s two escapes from the
-condemned hold, carefully described by Ainsworth, are cases in point).
-To resume, our felon was now frequently visited by the Ordinary, who
-zealously inquired (from the most interested motives) into his past
-life, and admonished him of his approaching doom. At chapel o’ Sundays
-he sat with his fellows in the condemned pew, a large dock-like
-erection painted black, which stood in the centre, right in front of
-and close to the ordinary’s desk and pulpit. For his last church-going
-the condemned sermon was preached, the burial service was read, and
-prayers were put up “especially for those awaiting the awful execution
-of the law.” The reprieved also were present, and the chapel was packed
-with as many spectators as could squeeze their way in.
-
-Now, our old law was not so bad as it seemed. True, the death-penalty
-was affixed to small offences; but it was comparatively rarely exacted.
-In looking over Old Bailey sessions-papers of from one to two centuries
-ago, I am struck with the number of acquittals--brought about, I
-fancy, by the triviality of the crime, not the innocence of the
-prisoner--and jurors constantly appraised the articles at twelve pence
-or under to reduce the offence to petty larceny, which was not capital,
-and after sentence each case was carefully considered on its merits by
-the King in Council (the extraordinary care which George III. gave to
-this matter is well known: he was often found pondering sentences late
-into the night). Only when the offender was inveterate or his crime
-atrocious was the death-penalty exacted. In effect, cases now punished
-by long terms of penal servitude were then ordered for execution.
-I don’t pretend to say whether or no to-day’s plan may be the more
-merciful. We have, on the authority of the Newgate Ordinary, a list
-between 1700 and 1711. Of forty-nine condemned in one year, thirty-six
-were reprieved and thirteen executed, in another year thirty-eight
-were condemned, twenty were reprieved, and eighteen were executed; the
-highest annual return of executions during that period was sixty-six,
-the lowest five. An Act of 1753 (25 Geo. II., c. 37) provided for the
-speedy exit and dissection of murderers; but the fate of other felons
-might hang dubious, as weeks often elapsed without a Privy Council
-meeting. The Recorder of London brought up the report from Windsor.
-When it reached Newgate, usually late at night, the condemned prisoners
-were assembled in one ward. The Ordinary entered in full canonicals
-and spoke his fateful message to each kneeling wretch. “I am sorry to
-tell you it is all against you,” would fall on one man’s trembling
-ears; while “Your case has been taken into consideration by the King
-and Council and His Majesty has been mercifully pleased to spare your
-life,” was the comfortable word for another. The reprieved now returned
-thanks to God and the King; the others, all hope gone, must return to
-the condemned hold.
-
-There broke in on them here, during the midnight hours on the eve of
-their execution, the sound of twelve strokes of a hand-bell, the while
-a doleful voice in doleful rhyme addressed them:
-
-  You prisoners that are within,
-  Who for wickedness and sin....
-
-Here the rhyme failed; but in not less dismal prose the voice
-admonished them that on the morrow “the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre
-will toll for you in the form and manner of a passing bell”; wherefore
-it behoved them to repent. In later years the songster procured himself
-this rigmarole:--
-
-  Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
-  Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near
-  When you before th’ Almighty must appear.
-    Examine well yourselves; in time repent,
-    That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent.
-  And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
-  The Lord have mercy on your souls!
-                      Past twelve o’clock.
-
-Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St.
-Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the
-early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe,
-“citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his
-estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six
-shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to
-approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve,
-and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were
-likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any
-stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall
-(executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or
-rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his _Memoirs_. The rhymes
-were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune
-of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall
-and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind
-with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious.
-Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered
-curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of
-old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton
-croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul.
-“D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and
-I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note
-as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus
-again refreshed.
-
-But _Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum_ (a tag you may be sure the
-Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and
-our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his
-irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter,
-who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope
-thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not
-free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle
-drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and
-the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to
-the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward.
-Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall
-of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist
-of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:--“All good
-people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going
-to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor
-passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately
-considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before
-his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own
-charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office
-to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath
-an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the
-cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular,
-a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of
-two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps
-of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If
-nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy
-Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.”
-And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses
-the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the
-“Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through
-Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and
-then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the
-High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the
-word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those
-elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple
-piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey
-without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge
-bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might
-drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for
-us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that
-chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster,
-some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring
-how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of
-Elizabethan wit, “that drinking of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to
-Tyburn, said:--‘That were good drink if a man might tarry by it.’” The
-Lazar went, but the St. Giles’s bowl lingered, only no longer a shaven
-monk, but the landlord of the Bowl or the Crown, or what not, handed up
-the liquor.
-
-Bowl Yard, which vanished into Endell Street, long preserved the memory
-of this “last refreshing.” At York a like custom prevailed, whereof
-local tradition recorded a quaint apologue. The saddler of Bawtry
-needs must hang--why and wherefore no man knoweth. To the amazement
-and horror of all he most churlishly refused the proffered bowl. Pity
-was but wasted (so our forefathers thought) on such a fellow. Before
-a dry-eyed crowd he was strung up with the utmost dispatch, but a
-reprieve arriving, was cut down just as quickly. All too late, however!
-He was done with this world. Had he but reasonably tarried, as others
-did, for his draught, he had died in his bed like many a better man.
-Hence the rustic moralist taught how the saddler of Bawtry was hanged
-for leaving of his ale. The compilers of the Sunday school treatises
-have scandalously neglected this leading case of lost opportunities.
-Nay, though a pearl “richer than all his tribe,” you shall search the
-works of Dr. Smiles for it in vain.
-
-But the day wears on, and our procession must farther westward along
-Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street). It is soon quit of houses; yet the
-crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and
-gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the
-beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words
-to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the
-crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways.
-If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying
-speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or
-even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. Or “some of the Sheriff’s
-officers discovering impatience to have the execution dispatched” (thus
-Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of a case in 1684), Jack cuts things short
-by whipping up his horses and leaves his victim dangling and agape.
-More decorously the cap is drawn over his face, and he himself gives
-the signal to turn off. The Hangman, if in genial mood, now stretches
-the felon’s legs for him, or thumps his breast with the benevolent
-design of expelling the last breath; but the brute is usually too lazy
-or too careless, and these pious offices are performed by friends.
-
-The accessories of such a last scene are preserved in Hogarth’s
-_Apprentice_ Series. One of the crowd is picking a pocket, and you
-foresee him ending here some day soon. (Is it not told of one rascal,
-that he urged on the attendants his right to a near view, since, sure
-of hanging some day, he naturally wished to see how it was done?)
-Another in the crowd is bawling, a trifle prematurely, the last
-speech and dying confession of Thomas Idle. Verses commemorative of
-the occasion were sold broadcast. “Tyburn’s elegiac lines,” as you
-may suppose, were sad doggerel. Here is the concluding portion of a
-specimen (_temp. circa_ 1720):
-
-  Fifteen of us you soon will see
-  Ending our days with misery
-      At the Tree, at the Tree.
-
-Even at Tyburn, how hard to renounce all hope! There was ever the
-chance of a reprieve. There is at least one well-authenticated case of
-a man making a sudden bolt from the cart, and almost escaping; and,
-as the _modus_ was simple strangulation, and the Hangman careless or
-corrupt, it was just possible that heroic remedies might restore to
-animation. On December 12, 1705, John Smith was turned off, and hung
-for a quarter of an hour. A reprieve arriving, he was cut down, and
-coaxed back to life. More remarkable was the case of William Duell, in
-1740. To all appearance thoroughly well hanged, he was carried off for
-dissection to Surgeons’ Hall, where he presently recovered himself.
-He was, somewhat cruelly, restored to Newgate, but was let off with
-transportation. The law was not always so merciful. In another case,
-the sheriff’s officers, having heard that their prey was again alive
-and kicking, hunted the wretch out, haled him back to Tyburn, and
-hanged him beyond the possibility of doubt. The rumour of such marvels
-inspired many attempts at resuscitation. I fancy about one per cent.
-were successful, but how to tell, since the instance just quoted shows
-that such triumphs were better concealed?
-
-Now, the _corpus_ is essential to the _experimentum_, so half an hour
-after the turning off, the friends bring up a deal coffin, borne
-across an unhinged coach door or any such make-shift bier. But Ketch
-is still in possession: the clothes are Hangman’s perquisites, and
-must be purchased. How the greedy rascal appreciates the value of each
-button, dwells on the splendour of each sorry ornament, watching the
-while and gauging the impatience of the buyers! Never went second-hand
-duds at such a figure! Sometimes he overreaches himself, or no one
-comes forward to bid. Then the corpse is rudely stripped, “and the
-Miscellany of Rags are all crushed into a sack which the Valet de
-Chambre carries on purpose, and being digested into Monmouth Street,
-Chick Lane, &c., are comfortably worn by many an industrious fellow.”
-And sometimes the law claims the body to be removed and hung in chains.
-
-In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied
-to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and
-dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or
-London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar
-in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central
-gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the
-authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for
-political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He
-would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the
-Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with
-bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign
-against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was
-burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record
-where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking
-proved abortive and----! The sledge so often supplanted the less
-ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a
-political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband
-by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of
-treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly.
-
-Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now
-claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said
-“Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to
-the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world
-into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to
-an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier
-sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a
-keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying
-machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange
-duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects
-so many curious facts in his _Chronicles of Newgate_, alleges him not
-seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the
-table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison,
-the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending
-each execution (the _deid clack_, so they called such festivity in
-Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted
-that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save
-brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a
-prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory,
-unrecorded even by _The Dictionary of National Biography_. One (as fly
-in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves.
-
-  E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,
-
-sneers Pope, referring to an alleged habit of merely giving initials.
-I have turned over a fair number of the Reverend James Guthrie’s
-accounts of criminals. In those he always writes the name in full. The
-witty though himself forgotten Tom Brown scribbles the epitaph of the
-Reverend Samuel Smith, another Ordinary:--
-
-                  Whither he’s gone
-            Is not certainly known,
-            But a man may conclude,
-            Without being rude,
-            That orthodox Sam
-            His flock would not shame.
-  And to show himself to ’em a pastor most civil,
-  As he led, so he followed ’em on to the d----l.
-
-And there were the Reverend Thomas Purney, and the Reverend John
-Villette, but these be well-nigh empty names. We know most about the
-Reverend Paul Lorrain, who was appointed in 1698, and died in 1719,
-leaving the respectable fortune of £5000. A typical Ordinary of the
-baser sort this; a greedy, gross, sensual wretch, who thrived and grew
-fat on the perquisites of his office. Among these was a broadsheet,
-published at eight o’clock the morning after a hanging. It was headed,
-“The Ordinary of Newgate, his Account of the Behaviour, Confessions,
-and Last Speeches of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn,
-the--.” It gave the names and sentences of the convicts, copious
-notes of the sermons (of the most wooden type) he preached at them,
-biographies, and confessions, and finally the scenes at the gallows.
-Let the up-to-date journalist cherish Lorrain’s name. He was an early
-specimen of the personal interviewer: he had the same keen scent for
-unsavoury detail, the same total disregard for the feelings or wishes
-of his victim, the same readiness to betray confidence; and he had
-his subject at such an advantage! You imagine the sanctimonious air
-wherewith he produced his notebook and invited the wretch’s statement.
-With the scene at Tyburn variety in detail was impossible. “Afterwards
-the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off,” is his formula. You had
-a good twopenn’orth, such was his usual modest charge! The first page
-top was embellished with two cuts: on the left Old Newgate Archway, on
-the right Tyburn Tree. (Gurney affected a quainter design, wherein he
-stood, in full canonicals in the centre pointing the way to Heaven,
-whilst on his left the Fiend, furnished with a trident, squirmed in a
-bed of flames.) The broadsheet was authenticated by his signature.
-
-Now, two things made the Reverend Paul exceeding wroth. One was the
-issue of pirated confessions, which were “a great Cheat and Imposture
-upon the World,” and they would not merely forge his name but mis-spell
-it to boot! His is “the only true _Account_ of the Dying Criminals,”
-he urgently, and no doubt truly, asserts. All this touched his pocket,
-hence his ire, which blazed no less against the unrepentant malefactor,
-who--a scarce less grievous offence--touched his professional pride. He
-did not mince words:--“he was a Notorious and Hard-hearted Criminal,”
-or afflicted with brutish ignorance or of an obstinate and hardened
-disposition. “There is,” he would pointedly remark, “_a Lake of
-Brimstone, a Worm that dies not, and a Fire which shall never be
-quenched_. And this I must plainly tell you, that will be your dismal
-portion there for ever, unless you truly Repent here in time.” And
-after “Behaviour” in the title of his broadsheets, he would insert, in
-parentheses, “or rather Misbehaviour.” Most of his flock, stupid with
-terror, passively acquiesced in everything he said. These “Lorrain
-saints,” as Steele called them, received ready absolution at his hands
-and their reported end was most edifying. But in James Sheppard (the
-Jacobite), who suffered March 17, 1718, for treason, Lorrain had a
-most vexatious subject. A non-juring divine, “that Priest or Jesuit,
-or Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,” as the Rev. Paul describes him, attended
-the convict, and the Ordinary’s services were quite despised. The
-intruder, “e’en at the _Gallows_, had the Presumption to give him
-Publick Absolution, tho’ he visibly dy’d without Repentance.” Dr.
-Doran assures us that, on the way to Tyburn, Paul and his supplanter
-came to fisticuffs, and our Ordinary was unceremoniously kicked from
-the cart. One would like to believe this entertaining legend, for “the
-great historiographer,” as Pope and Bolingbroke sarcastically dub him,
-grows less in your favour the more you scan his sheets. His account
-of Sheppard concludes with the most fulsome professions of loyalty
-to the King and the Protestant Succession, for which he is ready to
-sacrifice his life. You note that he was charged with administering
-the sacrament for temporal ends, some scandal apparently of shamful
-traffic in the elements. There is no proof--indeed, we have nothing to
-go on but his own denial; but it shows the gossip whereof he was the
-centre. He had ingenious methods of spreading his sale. Thus he tells
-his readers that a fuller account of a special case will be published
-along with that of prisoners that go for execution to-morrow. In the
-case of Nathaniel Parkhurst, hanged May 20, 1715, for the murder of
-Count Lewis Pleuro, he actually reports the convict on the eve of his
-execution cracking up in advance the report which his ghostly comforter
-will presently publish! Strange advertisements fill up the odd corners
-of his broadsheets. Here he puffs a manual of devotion by himself;
-there the virtue of a quack medicine, some sovran remedy for colic,
-gout, toothache, “The Itch or any Itching Humour.” Again, you have “The
-works of Petronius Arbiter, with Cuts and a Key,” or “Apuleius’s Golden
-Ass,” or some lewd publication of the day. Even if the advertisements
-were Paul’s publishers’, how strange the man and the time that suffered
-so incongruous a mixture! Our Ordinary petitioned parliament that his
-precious broadsheets might go free of the paper tax, by reason of their
-edifying nature!
-
-Turn we now to the Hangman. No rare figure _his_ in Old England! Only
-in later years was he individualised. In James I.’s time a certain
-Derrick filled the office. The playwrights keep his memory green, and
-the crane so called is said to take its name from him. Then there
-came Gregory Brandon, who had “a fair coat of arms,” and the title of
-esquire in virtue of his office. This was through a mad practical joke
-of York Herald, who, perceiving a solemn ass in Garter King-at-Arms,
-sent him in the papers somewhat ambiguously worded, and got the grant
-in due form. York and Garter were presently laid by the heels in the
-Marshalsea, “one for foolery, the other for knavery.”
-
-Gregory was succeeded by his son, also called Gregory, though his real
-name was Richard. His infantile amusement was the heading of cats and
-dogs, his baby fingers seemed ever adjusting imaginary halters on
-invisible necks; he was “the destined heir, From his soft cradle, to
-his father’s chair”--or rather cart and ladder. The younger Brandon
-was, it seems quite certain, the executioner of Charles I. Then
-followed Edward, commonly known as Esquire Dun, and then the renowned
-Jack Ketch, who went to his ghastly work with so callous a disregard
-for human suffering, or, as some fancied, with such monstrous glee,
-that his name, becoming the very synonym for hangman, clave to all his
-successors. He “flourished” 1663-1686. Dryden calls him an “excellent
-physician,” and commemorates him more than once in his full-resounding
-line. Some held Catch his true patronymic and Ketch a corruption of
-Jacquet, the family name of those who held the Manor of Tyburn during
-a great part of the seventeenth century, but this, however ingenious,
-seems too far-fetched. The original Jack was ungracious and surly
-even beyond the manner of his kind. In January 1686, for insolence
-to the sheriffs, “he was deposed and committed to Bridewell.” Pascha
-Rose, a butcher, succeeded but getting himself hanged in May Ketch was
-reinstated. It is recorded that he struck for higher pay--and got it
-too. You might fancy that any one could adjust the “Tyburn Tippet,”
-or “the riding knot an inch below the ear.” But the business called
-for its own special knack. In the _History of the Press-yard_ the
-Hangman is represented, after the suppression of the 1715 Rising, as
-cheerfully expectant, “provided the king does not unseasonably spoil
-my market by reprieves and pardons.” He will receive ample douceurs
-“for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their
-left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.”
-Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was
-never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the
-traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird
-worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these
-rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested
-for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It
-was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it
-too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon
-No-Popery Riots (_temp._ 1780, but of course you remember your _Barnaby
-Rudge_). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his
-old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old
-time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch
-every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he
-was then dismissed with this formula:--“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have
-noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate--his wages were paid
-over the gate--and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave
-a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering
-mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch.
-
-In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew
-its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes.
-I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot
-have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas
-Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant
-in that primitive time little more than a political difference with
-the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He
-proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change
-its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his
-head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king”
-on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after
-abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry
-VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share.
-On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King
-caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse,
-in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation,
-after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the
-Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued
-the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked
-that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet
-he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he
-suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last,
-while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of
-his disciples stood round. They fought for relics which the authorities
-were determined they should not have, so that a young man having dipped
-his handkerchief in the blood was forthwith arrested. In the confusion
-some one cut off a finger and conveyed it away. Some one else offered
-twenty pounds for a finger-joint, but the hangman dared not let it go.
-The fevered imagination of Campion’s adorers saw wondrous signs. Some
-pause in the flow of the Thames was noted on that day, and was ascribed
-thereto. The river
-
-                Awhile astonished stood
-  To count the drops of Campion’s sacred blood.
-
-Campion himself had long a presentiment of his fate, which, considering
-the desperate nature of his mission, was not wonderful; and when
-occasion took him past the Triple Tree he was moved to uncover his
-head. Southwell, the “sweet singer” of the Catholic reaction, told the
-end of his friend in a little work printed at Douay, but in English,
-and of course for English circulation; and in 1595 Southwell followed
-his brother priest. His followers noted that, when his heart was torn
-out, “it leaped from the dissector’s hand and, by its thrilling, seemed
-to repel the flames.” A strange legend--not quite baseless, Mr. Gardner
-thinks--shows the effect of such scenes on the Catholic mind. Henrietta
-Maria, Charles I.’s queen, walked barefoot to Tyburn, as to a shrine,
-at dead of night, and did penance under the gallows for the sins of her
-adopted country. A felon of a very different order was Mrs. Turner, who
-suffered (November 14, 1615) for complicity in Sir Thomas Overbury’s
-murder. She had invented yellow starch, and my Lord Coke with a fine
-sense of the picturesque ordained her to hang “in her yellow Tinny
-Ruff and Cuff.” She dressed the part gallantly; “her face was highly
-rouged, and she wore a cobweb lawn ruff, yellow starched.” The Hangman
-had also yellow bands and cuffs, he tied her hands with a black silk
-ribbon herself had provided, as well as a black veil for her face.
-Being turned off, she seemed to die quietly. But yellow starch went
-hopelessly out of fashion!
-
-After the Restoration, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw
-were dug up at Westminster, removed at night to the Red Lion Inn,
-Holborn, drawn next morning (January 30, 1661), the anniversary of
-Charles’s death, to Tyburn, and there hanged in their shrouds on the
-three wooden posts of the gallows. At nightfall they were taken down
-and beheaded; the bodies being there buried, whilst the heads adorned
-Westminster Hall. Noll had his picturesque historians before Carlyle.
-A wild tale arose that his original funeral at the Abbey had been but
-a mock ceremonial; for his body, according to his own instructions,
-had been secretly removed to Naseby, and buried at nightfall on the
-scene of that victory. Even if we disregard this legend, the subsequent
-adventures of Cromwell’s head have been a matter of as much concern to
-antiquaries as ever the Royal Martyr’s was to Mr. Dick.
-
-Time would fail to narrate the picturesque and even jovial exits of
-those “curled darlings” of the _Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors’ Bloody
-Register_ (or any other form of the _Newgate Chronicle_), those idols
-of the popular imagination, the Caroline and Georgian highwaymen. Swift
-pictures the very ideal in _Clever Tom Clinch_, who--
-
-                  ... while the rabble was bawling,
-  Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling;
-  He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack,
-  And promised to pay for it--when he came back.
-  His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white.
-  His cap had a new cherry-ribbon to tie’t;
-  And the maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
-  And cried “Lack-a-day! he’s a proper young man!”
-
-But how to summarise the infinite variety of detail? To tell how, when
-Claude Duval swung (January 21, 1670) Ladies of Quality looked on in
-tears and masks; how he lay in more than royal state in Tangier Tavern,
-St. Giles’s; and how they carved on his stone “in the centre aisle of
-Covent Garden Church,” the pattern of a highwayman’s epitaph:
-
-  Here lies Du Vall: reader, if male thou art,
-  Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.
-
-How the mob bolted with Jack Sheppard’s body (November 16, 1724) to
-save the “bonny corp” from the surgeon’s knife! How Jonathan Wild,
-“the Great” (May 24, 1725), during the finishing touches picked the
-Ordinary’s pocket of his corkscrew, and was turned off with it still
-in his hand (thus Fielding: Purney was the ordinary. _His_ account
-is quite different), to the unspeakable delight of that enormous body
-of spectators, to which Sheppard’s two hundred thousand onlookers
-were (Defoe assures us) no more to be compared than is a regiment to
-an army. How Sixteen-string Jack (November 30, 1774), his “bright
-pea-green coat” and “immense nosegay” were almost _too_ magnificent
-even for so noble an occasion. Alas! not ours to dwell on such details;
-let the brave rogues go!
-
-I cull one instance from the peerage. Earl Ferrers suffered at Tyburn
-(May 5, 1760) for the death of Johnson, his land steward. He dressed
-in his wedding clothes, “a suit of white and silver”: “as good an
-occasion,” he observed, “for putting them on, as that for which they
-were first made” (his treatment of his wife had indirectly brought
-about the murder). Every consideration was paid to my Lord’s feelings:
-“A landau with six horses” was _his_ Tyburn cart, and a silk rope _his_
-“anodyne necklace”; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was
-so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than
-hanging, he protested to the sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five
-guineas was handed by mistake to the Hangman’s man, and an unseemly
-altercation ensued. My Lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I
-right?” were his last words. The accurate fall of the drop must have
-satisfied him that he was.
-
-I must not neglect the clergy. Here the leading case is obviously
-that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (June 27, 1777). The strange ups
-and down of his life (“he descended so low as to become the editor
-of a newspaper”) are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his
-last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol,
-thought him deserving of pity “because hanged for the least crime
-he had committed.” Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save him;
-also wrote his address to the judge (sentence had been respited) in
-reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in
-Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a
-reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems
-to argue not a first, only a first discovered, offence. His doggerel
-_Thoughts in Prison_ is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach.
-His “considerable time in praying,” and “several showers of rain,”
-rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen.
-One was very much affected; “the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as
-he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and
-did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most
-approved pattern) of Dodd’s unhappy end. The pair had spent much time
-together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette’s behaviour
-is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a
-correspondent of George Selwyn himself an enthusiastic amateur of
-executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief
-_à la Tyburn_, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like
-craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when
-that divine was hanged (April 19, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay.
-When Hackman let fall the handkerchief for signal it fell _outside_
-the cart, and Ketch with an eye to small perquisites jumped down to
-secure it _before_ he whipped up the horse. These are all names more
-or less known. There are hundreds of curious incidents connected with
-obscure deaths. Here are a few samples:--In 1598 “some mad knaves took
-tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn.” In 1677, a
-woman and “a little dog ten inches high” were hanged side by side as
-accomplices--“a hideous prospect,” comments our chronicler. In 1684
-Francis Kirk, having murdered his wife, must end at Tyburn. Shortly
-before he had seen a fellow hanged there for making away with _his_
-spouse; and this, he confessed, had inspired him!
-
-One John Austin had the distinction of being the last person executed
-at Tyburn (November 7, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the
-procession as a public scandal. The sheriffs had some doubts as to
-their powers; but the judges, being consulted, assured them they could
-end it an they would. A month after (December 9, 1783) the gallows was
-at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting
-spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:--“Executions are
-intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose
-their reason. The old method was more satisfactory to all parties. The
-public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by
-it. Why is all this to be swept away?” In truth, the change of scene
-was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone--save
-for an occasional touch, as after Holling’s execution, when the dead
-hand was thrust into a woman’s bosom, to remove a mark or wen--the
-disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than
-in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who knowing their
-London well described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before
-Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution
-throughout the land. I do not criticise any system: I do but point
-out that of the two sets of opposing forces noted as working on the
-criminal’s mind, the latter, in a private execution, is entirely
-suppressed.
-
-Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its Hangmen, its Ordinaries,
-filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention
-in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has “The shape of Love’s
-Tyburn”; and Dryden’s “Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart” is a
-stock quotation. But I cannot string a chaplet of these pearls. Yet two
-phrases I must explain. A felon who “prayed his clergy” was during some
-centuries branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, ere he
-was released, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in
-popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598)
-for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again a statute
-of 1698 (10 Will. III. c. 12), provided for those who prosecuted a
-felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial
-duties. This was known as a “Tyburn ticket.” It had a certain money
-value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was
-abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 27), but it was allowed as late
-as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his
-ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an
-Old Bailey jury.
-
-
-
-
-Pillory and Cart’s-Tail
-
-    Hood and Lamb on the Pillory--Its Various Shapes--Butcher and
-    Baker--Brawler and Scold--Fraudulent Attorneys--End of the Pillory
-    and of Public Whipping--Literary Martyrs--De Foe--Prynne, Bastwick,
-    and Burton--Case of Titus Oates--The Tale of a Cart--Some Lesser
-    Sufferers.
-
-
-Hood has comically told of his pretended experiences in the
-Pillory:--“It is a sort of Egg-Premiership: a place above your
-fellows, but a place which you have on trial. You are not without the
-established political vice, for you are not exempt from turning,”--with
-more punning cogitations of a like nature. Of rarer humour is Charles
-Lamb’s _Reflections in the Pillory_, with its invocation to them that
-once stood therein:--“Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over
-thee--Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare--from their
-(little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions.
-Ketch, turn me!” A century or so earlier these ingenious wits had
-possibly stood therein--in fact and not in fancy. It was a way our
-old-time rulers had of rewarding ingenious wits. And not wits alone:
-since for many centuries it was in daily use throughout the length and
-breadth of Merrie England.
-
-Our treatment of crime is the exact opposite of our forefathers’. Our
-criminal toils, is flogged, is hanged in private; the old idea was
-to make punishment as public as possible, for so penalty and effect
-(it was thought) were heightened and increased. The Pillory was the
-completest expression of this idea. A man was exposed for sixty minutes
-in the market-place at the busiest hour of the day, and the public
-itself was summoned to approve of and aid the punishment. The thing
-was known in old Saxon days. In the laws of Withred it is called
-_healsfang_. The mediæval Latin name for it was _collistrigium_. Both
-terms = a “catch for the neck.” Its form varied. The simplest was a
-wooden frame or screen, with three holes in it, elevated some feet
-above the ground. The culprit stood behind upon a platform, his
-head and hands caught in and stuck through the aforesaid holes. This
-was much like the stocks, save that there the patient sat instead of
-stood and had his feet enclosed instead of his head and hands. In
-popular phrase this was “to peep through the nut-crackers.” Again,
-the structure swung on a pivot; so that the inmate might face the
-compass points in turn. Sometimes, though this was rather a foreign
-fashion, it was so commodious that it would take a nosegay of twelve;
-at the same time that it went revolving and revolving--a very far from
-merry-go-round! Now (as at Dublin) it was the kernel of a large and
-imposing structure of stone. Now (as at Coleshill, in Warwickshire)
-it stood a deft arrangements of uprights, boards, and holes, and did
-triple duty--as stocks, as whipping-post, as Pillory. Now, yet again
-(as at Marlborough, in Wiltshire), the frame turned on a swivel at the
-will of the patient, whose deft twistings in dodging missiles hugely
-delighted the grinning mob. With pen and pencil Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt
-and other antiquarians have preserved for our delectation yet other
-forms.
-
-The Pillory was first used for dishonest bakers, brewers, corn-sellers,
-and the like. Then, its offices were extended to divers kinds of
-misdemeanants. Later, it was the lot of your scurrile pamphleteer, your
-libeller, and your publisher of unlicensed volumes. The victim was not
-always pelted; for feeling might run high against the Government; and
-when he was acclaimed his shame became his glory. So the thing served
-as a weather-glass of popular opinion.
-
-I turn to some historic instances. Under Henry III., by the Assize
-of Bread and Ale, it was decreed that knavish bakers, brewers, and
-butchers be “set on the pyllory.” It was also provided that “The
-pyllory shal be of a metely strengthe, so that they that be fautye
-may be thereon without any jeopardye of their lyvys.” (The platform
-must not seldom have broken down, leaving the “worm of the hour”
-suspended by the neck--that had been securely fastened--in peril of
-strangulation, in a case of this sort, under Elizabeth, he sued the
-town, and recovered damages.) The articles of usage for the City of
-London, published under Edward I., set forth some evil humours of the
-time. Rustical simplicity fell, then as now, an easy prey to urban
-cunning. What rascals these mediæval cits were, to be sure! Thus, your
-corn dealer would take in grain from harmless necessary bumpkins, to
-whom he would give an earnest, telling them to come to his house for
-payment. Here he met them with a long face:--his wife had gone out with
-the key of the cash-box; would his country friends call again? And when
-they do, he is “not in.” (Ah! That “call again” and that “not in!” Were
-they stale so many centuries ago?) If the rogue were discovered, he
-impudently denied his debt:--he had never seen the gentlemen before;
-or, raising some dispute about the price, he told him to take back his
-goods--when the corn was found too wet for removal. “By these means
-the poor men lose half their pay in expenses before they are settled
-with;” and the wrong-doer is to be amerced heavily. Being unable to
-pay, “then he shall be put on the Pillory, and remain there an hour in
-the day at least; a Serjeant of the City standing by the side of the
-Pillory with good hue-and-cry as to the reason why he is punished.”
-The wicked butcher suffered after the same fashion; while the baker,
-who put off bad bread, was drawn--for the first offence upon a hurdle
-from the Guildhall to his own house, by “the great streets that are
-most dirty, with the faulty loaf hanging about his neck,” a spectacle
-to gods and a cockshy for men. For the second offence he processioned
-as before; and, to boot, he must stand in the Pillory for an hour.
-Offending for the third time, he was judged incorrigible: his oven was
-dismantled, and he might bake within the city bounds no more. Sure, the
-ancient London loaf, be it _manchet_, or _chete_, or mere _mystelon_,
-must ever have been of good quality? When, indeed, did the falling off
-begin? Was it when the city fathers unwisely took to regulating men’s
-morals? In the seventh of Richard II. this punishment was ordained
-for the man of evil life:--“Let his head and beard be shaved except a
-fringe on the head two inches in breadth, and let him be taken to the
-Pillory, with minstrels, and set thereon for a certain time, at the
-discretion of the Mayor and Aldermen.” As for the erring sister, she
-was taken from the prison into Aldgate with a hood of ray and a white
-wand in her hand. From Aldgate minstrels played her to the Thew (a
-species of Pillory for women). Thence, her offence being proclaimed,
-she was led “through Chepe and Newgate to Cokkes Lane, there to take
-up her abode.” Again, the brawler or the scold must hold a distaff
-with tow in hand--and so on; for your old-time law-giver lusted after
-variation.
-
-Once the Pillory was an indispensable ornament of the market-place.
-Nay, were it not kept fit for use, the very right to hold a market
-might be lost. As an emblem of power, it was claimed by the great
-lords: often, indeed, it went with the lordship of the manor. Thus at
-Beverley, in the twenty-first of Edward I., John, Archbishop of York,
-claims the right of Pillory with the right of gallows and gibbet;
-and with the right of Pillory the right of tumbrell, which was the
-dung-cart wherein minor malefactors were shamefully trundled through
-the town. Legislative ingenuity was ever striving to devise fresh marks
-of ignominy. Stow relates that, in the seventh of Edward IV., certain
-common jurors must (for their partial conduct) ride in paper mitres
-from Newgate to the Pillory in Cornhill, and there do penance for their
-fault. Again, in the first of Henry VIII. (1509), Smith and Simpson,
-ringleaders of false inquests, rode the City (also in paper mitres)
-with their faces to the horse’s tail; and they were set on the Pillory
-in Cornhill; and they were brought again to Newgate, where they died
-from very shame. The like fate, it seems, befell a much later offender,
-one James Morris, who was pilloried (April 2, 1803) for fraud in the
-market place at Lancaster. Next morning he was found dead in his bed,
-and the coroner’s jury brought it in as “visitation of God.” Oft-times
-the sufferer came less mysteriously to his end. The mobility was,
-in effect, invited, as it were, to italicise his sentence in terms
-of anything you please, from rotten eggs to brickbats. Not seldom it
-did so to the sternest purpose. On June 22, 1732, contemporary prints
-report:--“Last night the corpse of John Walker, who was killed in the
-Pillory on Tuesday last, was buried at St. Andrew’s, Holborn;” and
-among the casualties of the December of that same year, the case of
-another poor wretch is dismissed with “murder’d in the pillory.” In
-1756 Egon and two others were pilloried for procuring the commission of
-a robbery, in order to get a reward for its detection. Egon was stoned
-to death. On one or two occasions--notably when Elizabeth Collier was
-pilloried by order of Jeffreys in 1680--the authorities were ordered to
-see that the peace was kept and that the culprit suffered the exposure
-alone.
-
-A long list might be given of misdemeanours punished by the
-Pillory:--as, practising the art magick; cutting a purse; placing a
-piece of iron in a loaf of bread; selling bad oats, stinking eels,
-strawberry pottles half fall of fern; vending ale by measures not
-sealed and thickening the bottom of such measures with pewter. As
-(also) lies, defamations, and libels of all sorts. If the lie were
-notorious, or were told of the mayor or any other dignitary, the liar
-was pilloried with a whetstone round his neck: whence it came that a
-whetstone was the popular reward for audacious mendacity, and “lying
-for the whetstone” was a current phrase.
-
-Late Tudor and Stuart times edged and weighted the punishment of
-the Pillory. It might be preceded by a flogging at the Cart’s-tail.
-Stripped to the waist, the culprit, man or woman, was tied to the
-hinder end (our fathers used a shorter phrase) of a cart, and was thus
-lashed through the streets. (This vulgarly was called, “Shoving the
-tumbler,” or “Crying carrots and turnips.”) Or, as Butler’s couplet
-reminds us, the patient’s ears were nailed to the wood:--
-
-  Each window like a Pillory appears,
-  With heads thrust through, nail’d by the ears.
-
-Or his ears were cropped, and not seldom his nose was slit likewise.
-In 1570, Timothy Penredd was pilloried in Chepe on two successive
-market-days for counterfeiting the seal of the Queen’s Bench. Each
-time an ear was nailed; and this poor member he must free “by his own
-proper motion.” If the wrench were too great for human fortitude, the
-thoughtful authorities lent some aid. In one case (1552) the culprit
-would not “rent his eare”; so that in the long run “one of the bedles
-slitted yt upwards with a penkniffe to loose it.” Indeed, the law had
-a strong grudge against the ears of malefactors. The fourteenth of
-Elizabeth, cap. 5, ordered that vagrants be grievously whipped and
-burned through the gristle of the right ear, unless some credible
-person took them to service (if they relapsed they were hanged). The
-punishments of the time show a curious alternation between Pillory
-and Cart. Thus, whilst keepers of immoral houses were carted about
-the town to the music of ringing basins, in the eleventh of James I.,
-William Barnwell, “gentleman” (an inaccurate description had vitiated
-the indictment), and his wife Thomasina, criminals of the same class,
-were whipped at the Cart’s-tail from the prison to their house, and
-back again. Thus, too, were handled those who lived by cards and dice;
-but, for witchcraft, Dorothy Magicke was set four times a year upon
-the Pillory, and must thereon make public confession. This man capers
-dolefully at the Cart’s-tail for stealing lead; that must take his
-turn in the Pillory for snatching three-pence worth of hairs from a
-mare’s tail. Later, it was thought excellent for fraudulent attorneys.
-In November 1786 one “Mr. A----” (the name is thus disguised), a legal
-gentleman, was brought from Newgate in a hackney cab and pilloried for
-an hour hard by the gate of Westminster Hall. What he did, and how he
-fared, we are not told; so it may be that his hap was even as Thomas
-Scott’s, pilloried for a false accusation in January 1804. Scott was
-pelted with rotten eggs, filth, and dirt of the street. Also, the
-neighbouring ragamuffins had thoughtfully collected good store of dead
-cats and rats “in the vicinity of the metropolis” that morning.
-
-Was it so very edifying after all? Opinions began to differ. Yet Lord
-Thurlow solemnly cracked it up “as a restraint against licentiousness
-provided by the wisdom of our ancestors”; and in 1814 Lord Ellenborough
-ordered Lord Cochrane to be pilloried for conspiring to spread false
-news. The justice of this last abominable sentence was questioned.
-Sir Francis Burdett, Cochrane’s fellow-member for Middlesex, vowed
-that he would stand with him on the day of punishment; but the
-Government did not venture to carry out the sentence. Two years later,
-in 1816, the punishment of Pillory was restricted to persons guilty
-of perjury; and in 1837, by the 1 Vict. cap. 23, it was abolished
-altogether. The last person who suffered it is said to have been
-Peter James Bossy, pilloried in front of the Old Bailey, June 24,
-1830. The public whipping of women went in 1817; the private followed
-in 1820 by 1 Geo. IV. cap. 57. The whipping of men for a common law
-misdemeanour has never been formally abolished; but the punishment is
-now inflicted only under the Garrotters Act (1863) for robbery with
-violence; which, of course, has nothing to do with existing statutory
-provisions for the flogging of juvenile male offenders. I should add
-that in America Pillory and Whipping-Post were “an unconscionable time
-a-dying”; lingered especially in the State of Delaware; and that their
-restoration has been urged.
-
-The Finger Pillory deserves a word. It was fixed up inside churches
-(that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, for instance) and halls. Boys who
-misbehaved during service, and offenders at festive times against
-the mock reign of the lord of misrule, alike expiated their offences
-therein.
-
-I note some remarkable cases. First, and most important, is the group
-of literary martyrs. The Stuart Government could not crush the press;
-but author, printer, and publisher all worked in peril of the Pillory.
-The author of _Robinson Crusoe_ was, perhaps, its most famous inmate.
-
-  Earless on high stood unabash’d De Foe,
-  And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below,
-
-sings Pope in the _Dunciad_ with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe,
-for his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_, was condemned to stand
-thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in
-Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very
-well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls
-a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (_Hymn
-to the Pillory_). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned
-Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but
-then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John
-Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped
-death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys,
-on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment,
-during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town
-in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that
-this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained.
-Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King
-to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither
-whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled;
-and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the
-Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined
-Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So
-after he had treated Mr. _Tutchin_ with a glass of wine, Mr. _Tutchin_
-went away.”
-
-Another of Pope’s examples is “old Prynne,” cropped (in 1632) in the
-Pillory for his _Histriomastic_, or Players’ Scourge, which was held to
-reflect on Charles I.’s Queen. Again he stood there in 1637, when the
-executioner cruelly mangled the ancient stumps. A quite incorrigible
-person was this same William Prynne, described by Marchmont Needham
-as “one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept about a library.”
-He wrote some forty works remarkable for virulence even in that age
-of bitter polemics. He strenuously supported the Restoration, and the
-new Government was at its wit’s end what to do with him till Charles
-himself solved the difficulty with happy humour. “Let him amuse himself
-with writing against the Catholics and poring over the records in the
-Tower,” said the king; and silenced him with the Keepership of the
-Records and £500 a year. Prynne’s second appearance was for a bitter
-attack on Laud; and he had as fellow-sufferers John Bastwick, who had
-written a sort of mock _Litanie_, and Henry Burton. Bastwick was “very
-merrie.” His wife “got on a stool and kissed him;” and, “his ears being
-cut off, she called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and
-carried them away with her.” There was a great crowd, which “cried and
-howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropped.” Being angered by
-the jeers and execrations of the mob, the executioner did his work very
-brutally. Pope’s Billingsgate is classic, but it remains Billingsgate.
-The Pillory shows often in his verse. Edmund Curl was a pet aversion
-of his, and for publishing the _Memoirs of Ker of Kersland_ Curl
-suffered the punishment at Charing Cross on Feb. 23, 1728. Pope hints
-(_Dunciad_, II. 3 and 4) that he was badly handled by the mob. In truth
-he came off very well, owing, it seems, to an explanatory circular he
-got distributed among the spectators.
-
-As time wore on the punishment reverted to its earlier and milder form.
-Thus, in 1630, Dr. Leighton, for his _Zion’s Plea against Prelacy_,
-was pilloried, branded, cropped, and whipped; but the authors of the
-eighteenth century were punished by exposure alone, and were often
-solaced by popular sympathy. In 1765 Williams, the bookseller, stood
-in the Pillory for re-publishing _The North Briton_: he held a sprig
-of laurel in his hand, and a large collection was made for him then
-and there. In derision of authority the mob displayed (_inter alia_)
-the famous Bootjack--the popular reference to Lord Bute, the late
-Prime Minister. Still more farcical was the exposure (1759) of Dr.
-Shebbeare for publishing political libels. He was attended on the
-platform by a servant in livery holding an umbrella over his head,
-and his neck and arms were not confined. The court thought the
-under-sheriff of Middlesex something more than remiss: wherefore he
-was fined and imprisoned, it being judicially decided that the culprit
-must stand not merely _on_ but _in_ the Pillory. In this connexion I
-will only further mention the case of Eton the publisher, “a very old
-man,” who in 1812 was pilloried for printing Paine’s _Age of Reason_.
-Here, again, the crowd, by the respect it heaped upon the prisoner,
-altogether eliminated the sting from the punishment. The minor scribe
-of to-day is supposed to court an action, nay, a criminal prosecution,
-as a stimulus to circulation; a former age saw in the Pillory the best
-possible advertisement for the Grub Street hack. In Foote’s _Patron_,
-Puff, the publisher, urges Dactyl to produce a satire; and, when the
-proposed risk is hinted at, retorts: “Why, I would not give twopence
-for an author who was afraid of his ears.... Why, zooks, sir! I never
-got salt for my porridge till I mounted at the Royal Exchange, that was
-the making of me.... The true Castalian stream is a shower of eggs and
-a Pillory the poet’s Parnassus.”
-
-Among cases other than literary, a notable one is that of Titus Oates
-(1685), who, being convicted of perjury, was sentenced to stand in
-the Pillory and be whipped at the Cart’s-tail. The lashing was so
-cruelly done that you feel some pity even for that arch rascal. The
-curious computed that he received 2256 strokes with a whip of six
-thongs--13,536 strokes in all. Yet the wretch lived to enjoy a pension
-after the Revolution! There was another remarkable instance that same
-year. Thomas Dangerfield, convicted of libelling the King when Duke of
-York, was sentenced to a fine, to the Pillory, and to be whipped from
-Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The dreadful work was
-over, and he was returning prisonwards in a coach, when there steps
-forward Robert Francis, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, with the cruel jibe,
-“How now, friend? Have you had your heat this morning?” Dangerfield
-turned on him with bitter curses (“Son of a wh----” is the elegant
-sample preserved by the records). Francis, much enraged, thrust at the
-aching, smarting, bleeding wretch with a small cane, and by mischance
-put out an eye, so that in two hours Dangerfield was dead; and no great
-while thereafter he himself was tried, condemned, and hanged. According
-to the testimony of the Rev. Mr. Samuel Smith, Ordinary at Newgate, he
-made a very edifying end.
-
-Quite interesting is the case of Japhet Crook, _alias_ Sir Peter
-Stringer, whose unhappy memory is preserved in some of Pope’s most
-biting lines. In 1731, poor Japhet stood in the Pillory at Charing
-Cross for forging a deed; when the hangman, dressed like a butcher,
-“with a knife like a gardener’s pruning knife cut off his ears, and
-with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils.” The wretch endured all
-this with great patience; but at the searing “the pain was so great
-that he got up from his chair.” No wonder! Two years after Eleanor
-Beare, keeper of “The White Horse,” Nuns Green, Derby, was pilloried
-(August 1732) after just escaping the gallows for murder. She mounted
-the platform “with an easy air”; thus exasperating a mob already
-ill-disposed, which bombarded her with apples, eggs, turnips, and so
-forth; so that “the stagnate kennels were robbed of their contents, and
-became the cleanest part of the street.” Managing to escape, she dashed
-off, “a moving heap of filth,” but was presently seized and lugged
-back; and at the end of the hour she was carried to prison, “an object
-which none cared to touch.” A week after she was again forced to take
-her stand. The officer noted that her head was wondrous swelled, and
-he presently stripped it of “ten or twelve coverings,” whereof one was
-a pewter plate. Her aspect was most forlorn, but the crowd, no whit
-moved, pelted its hardest, and she was borne away more dead than alive.
-Yet she too not only lived, but “recovered her health, her spirits,
-and her beauty.” Two lighter instances, and I have done. In the early
-stages of Monmouth’s rebellion, an astrologer, consulting the stars,
-saw that the duke would be presently King of England. After Sedgemoor
-he was cast into Dorchester Gaol for this unlucky prediction. Again
-falling to his observations, he clearly read “that he would be whipped
-at the Cart’s ----”; and this time the planets spoke true. In 1783, the
-poet Cowper reports one humorous case from his own experience. At Olney
-a man was publicly whipped for theft; he whealed with every stroke; but
-that was only because the beadle drew the scourge against a piece of
-red ochre hidden in his hand. Noting the fraud, the parish constable
-laid his cane smartly about the shoulders of the all too-lenient
-official, whereat a country wench, in high dudgeon, set to pomelling
-the constable. And of the three the thief alone escaped punishment.
-
-
-
-
-State Trials for Witchcraft
-
-    Early Laws against Witchcraft--The Essex Witches--The Devon
-    Witches--The Bury St. Edmunds Case--Bewitched Children--The
-    Scepticism of Serjeant Keeling--Evidence of Sir Thomas Browne--The
-    Judge’s Charge--The End of it All--The Trial of Richard
-    Hathaway--The Comic Side of Superstition--A Rogue’s Punishment--A
-    Word in Conclusion.
-
-
-I propose to examine the Witchcraft cases in Howell’s twenty-one bulky
-volumes of State Trials. The general subject, even in England, is too
-vast for detailed treatment here; also it is choked with all manner of
-absurdities. In a trial some of these are pared away: you know what
-the people saw, or believed they saw, and you have the declarations of
-the witches themselves. Only five cases, all between 1616 (13 Jac. I.)
-and 1702 (1 Anne) are reported. The selection is capricious, for some
-famous prosecutions as that of the Lancashire witches are omitted, but
-it is fairly representative.
-
-In the early times Witchcraft and sorcery were left to the Church. In
-1541, 33 Hen. VIII. c. 8, made both felony without “benefit of clergy;”
-and by the 1 Jac. I. c. 12, all persons invoking any evil spirit, or
-taking up dead bodies from their graves to be used in any Witchcraft,
-sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or killing or otherwise hurting any
-person by such infernal arts, shall be guilty of felony without
-“benefit of clergy,” and suffer death. King James’s views on Witchcraft
-and his skill (whereon he greatly plumed himself) as witch-finder are
-famed. Royal influence went hand-in-hand with popular superstition. In
-less than a century and a half, legislative if not vulgar ideas were
-altered, and in 1736, by 9 Geo. II. c. 5, the laws against Witchcraft
-were swept away, though charlatans professing the occult sciences were
-still punished as cheats.
-
-I pass as of little interest Howell’s first case, that of Mary Smith,
-in 1616. More worthy of note are the proceedings against the Essex
-witches, some twenty in number, condemned at the Chelmsford Sessions on
-July 29, 1645, before the Earl of Warwick and other Justices. One noted
-witch was Elizabeth Clarke to whom the devil had appeared “in the shape
-of a proper gentleman with a laced band, having the whole proportion of
-a man.” She had certain imps, whom she called Jamara (“a white dogge
-with red spots”), Vinegar Tom, Hoult, and Sack and Sugar. So far the
-information of Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, gent., who further said
-that the same evening whereon the accused confessed those marvels to
-him, “he espied a white thing about the bignesse of a kitlyn,” which
-bit a piece out of his greyhound, and in his own yard that very night
-“he espied a black thing proportioned like a cat, only it was thrice
-as big, sitting on a strawberry-bed, and fixing the eyes on this
-informant.”
-
-John Sterne, gent., had equal wonders of imps the size of small dogs,
-and how Sack and Sugar were like to do him hurt. ’Twere well, said the
-malevolent Elizabeth, “that this informant were so quick, otherwise
-the said impe had soone skipped upon his face, and perchance had got
-into his throate, and then there would have been a feast of toades in
-this informant’s belly.” The witch Clarke ascribed her undoing to Anne
-Weste, widow, here usually called Old Beldam Weste, who, coming upon
-her as she was picking up a few sticks, and seeming to pity her for
-“her lamenesse (having but one leg) and her poverty,” promised to send
-her a little kitten to assist her. Sure enough, a few nights after
-two imps appeared, who vowed to “help her to an husband who should
-maintain her ever after.” A country justice’s notions of evidence are
-not supposed to be exact even to-day; what they were then let the
-information of Robert Tayler, also of Manningtree, show. It seems
-Clarke had accused one Elizabeth Gooding as a confederate. Gooding was
-refused credit at Tayler’s for half a pound of cheese, whereupon “she
-went away muttering and mumbling to herself, and within a few hours
-came again with money and bought a pound of cheese of this informant.”
-That very night Tayler’s horse fell grievously ill and four farriers
-were gravelled to tell what ailed it, but this portentous fact was
-noted: “the belly of the said horse would rumble and make a noyse as
-a foule chimney set on fire.” In four days it was dead. Tayler had
-also heard that certain confessed witches had “impeached the said
-Elizabeth Gooding for killing of this said horse,” moreover Elizabeth
-kept company with notorious witches--after which scepticism was scarce
-permissible. Rebecca Weste, a prisoner awaiting trial in Colchester,
-confessed how at a witches’ meeting the devil appeared to her in the
-shape of a dog and kissed her. In less than six months he came again
-and promised to marry her. “Shee said he kissed her, but was as cold as
-clay, and married her that night in this manner: he tooke her by the
-hand and led her about the chamber and promised to be a loving husband
-to death, and to avenge her of her enemies.”
-
-One Rawbood had taken a house over the head of Margaret Moon, another
-of the accused, with highly unpleasant consequences. Thus, Mrs.
-Rawbood, though a “very tydy and cleanly woman, sitting upon a block,
-after dinner with another neighbour, a little before it was time to go
-to church upon an Easter Day, the said Rawbood’s wife was on a sudden
-so filled with lice that they might have been swept off her clothes
-with a stick; and this informant saith he did see them, and that they
-were long and lean, and not like other lice.” More gruesome were the
-confessions of Rebecca Jones, of Osyth. One fine day some twenty-five
-years past she, a servant lass at Much-Clacton, was summoned by a knock
-at the door, where she saw “a very handsome young man, as shee then
-thought, but now shee thinks it was the devil.” Politely inquiring how
-she did, he desired to see her left wrist, which being shown him, he
-pulled out a pin “from this examinant’s owne sleeve, and pricked her
-wrist twice, and there came out a drop of bloud, which he took off
-with the top of his finger, and so departed”--leaving poor Rebecca’s
-heart all in a flutter. About four months afterwards as she was going
-to market to sell butter, a “man met with her, being in a ragged state,
-and having such great eyes that this examinant was very much afraid of
-him.” He presented her with three things like to “moules,” which she
-afterwards used to destroy her neighbours’ cattle, and now and again
-her neighbours themselves. In evidence against other suspects there was
-mention of a familiar called Elimanzer, who was fed with milk pottage,
-and of imps called Wynowe, Jeso, Panu, with many other remarkable
-particulars.
-
-The foregoing was collected before trial as information upon oath; but
-this testimony of Sir Thomas Bowes, knight, was given from the bench
-during the trial of Anne Weste, whom it concerned. He reported that
-an honest man of Manningtree passing Anne Weste’s door at the very
-witching hour of night, in bright moonlight saw four things like black
-rabbits emerge. He caught one of them, and beat the head of it against
-his stick, “intending to beat out the braines of it,” failing in which
-benevolent design, he next tried to tear off its head, “and as he wrung
-and stretched the neck of it, it came out between his hands like a lock
-of wooll;” then he went to a spring to drown it, but at every step he
-fell down, yet he managed to creep to the water, under which he held
-the thing “a good space.” Thinking it was drowned he let go, whereupon
-“it sprang out of the water into the aire, and so vanished away.” There
-was but one end possible for people who froze the rustic soul with such
-pranks. Each and all were soon dangling from the gallows.
-
-The case of the Devon witches tried at Exeter in August 1682 is much
-like the Essex business. The informations are stuffed with grotesque
-horrors, yet it is hard to believe that the accused--three poor women
-from Bideford, two of them widows--had been convicted but for their
-own confessions, which are full of copious and minute details of their
-dealings with Satan. Going to their death, they were worried by Mr.
-H----, a nonconformist preacher and (as is evident) a very pestilent
-fellow. “Did you pass through the keyhole of the door, or was the door
-open?” was one query. The witch asserted that like other people she
-entered by the door, though “the devil did lead me upstairs.” Mr. H----
-went on, “How do you know it was the devil?” “I knew it by his eyes,”
-she returned. Again, “Did you never ride over an arm of the sea on a
-cow?”--an exploit which the poor woman sturdily disclaimed. Mr. H----,
-a little dissatisfied, one fancies, prayed at them a while, after which
-two of the women were turned off the ladder. Mr. Sheriff tried his
-hand at the survivor: he was curious as to the shape or colour of the
-devil, and was answered that he appeared “in black like a bullock.”
-He again pressed her as to whether she went in “through the keyhole
-or the door,” but she alleged the more commonplace and (for a witch)
-unorthodox mode of entry, “and so was executed.”
-
-Between these two cases one occurred wherein the best legal intellect
-of the day was engaged--and with no better result. In March 1665, Rose
-Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, were indicted at the Assizes at Bury
-St. Edmunds for bewitching certain people. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief
-Baron of the Exchequer, presided. “Still his name is of account.” To
-an earlier time he seemed a judge “whom for his integrity, learning,
-and law, hardly any age, either before or since, could parallel.”
-William Durant, an infant, was one victim; his mother had promised
-Amy Duny a penny to watch him, but she was strictly charged not to
-give him suck. To what end? queried the court reflecting on Amy’s age.
-The mother replied: firstly, Amy had the reputation of a witch, and
-secondly, it was a custom of old women thus to please the child, “and
-it did please the child, but it sucked nothing but wind, which did
-the child hurt.” The two women had a quarrel on the subject: Amy was
-enraged, and departed after some dark sayings, and the boy forthwith
-fell into “strange fits of swounding.” Dr. Jacob, of Yarmouth, an
-eminent witch-doctor, advised “to hang up the child’s blanket in the
-chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put the child to bed
-to put it into the said blanket, and if she found anything in it she
-should not be afraid, but throw it into the fire.” The blanket was duly
-hung up, and taken down, when a great toad fell out, which being thrown
-into the fire made (not unnaturally) “a great and horrible noise;”
-followed a crack and a flash, and--exit the toad! The court with solemn
-foolishness inquired if the substance of the toad was not seen to
-consume? and was stoutly answered “No.” Next day Amy was discovered
-sitting alone in her house in her smock without any fire. She was in
-“a most lamentable condition,” having her face all scorched with fire.
-This deponent had no doubt as to the witch’s guilt, “for that the said
-Amy hath been long reputed to be a witch and a person of very evil
-behaviour, whose kindred and relations have been many of them accused
-for witchcraft, and some of them have been condemned.”
-
-Elizabeth Pacy was another bewitched child. By direction of the judge,
-Amy Duny was made to touch her, whereupon the child clawed the Old
-Beldam till the blood came--a portentous fact, for everybody knew that
-the bewitched would naturally scratch the tormentor’s face and thus
-obtain relief. The father of the child, Samuel Pacy (whose soberness
-and moderation are specially commended by the reporter), now told how
-Amy Duny thrice came to buy herrings, and, being as often refused,
-“went away grumbling, but what she said was not perfectly understood.”
-Immediately his child Deborah fell sick, whereupon Amy was set in the
-stocks. Here she confessed that, when any of her offspring were so
-afflicted, “she had been fain to open her child’s mouth with a tap to
-give it vitals,” which simple device the sapient Pacy practised upon
-his brats with some effect, but still continuing ill they vomited
-“crooked pins and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head,
-which pins, amounting to forty or more, together with the twopenny
-nail, were produced in court,” so what room was there for doubt? The
-children, continually accusing Amy Duny and Rose Cullender as cause
-of their sickness, were packed off by their distracted father to his
-sister at Yarmouth, who now took up the wondrous tale. When the younger
-child was taking the air out of doors, “presently a little thing like a
-bee flew upon her face, and would have gone into her mouth.” She rushed
-indoors, and incontinent vomited up a twopenny nail with a broad head,
-whose presence she accounted for thus: “the bee brought this nail and
-forced it into her mouth”; from all which the guilt of the witches was
-ever more evident.
-
-Even that age had its sceptics. Some people in court, chief among them
-Mr. Serjeant Keeling, whose position and learning made it impossible
-to disregard their opinion, “seemed much unsatisfied.” The learned
-serjeant pointed out that even if the children were bewitched, there
-was no real evidence to connect the prisoners with the fact. Then Dr.
-Browne, of Norwich, “a person of great knowledge” (no other, alas! than
-the Sir Thomas Browne of the _Religio Medici_), made a very learned if
-confusing dissertation on Witchcraft in general, with some curious
-details as to a late “great discovery of witches” in Denmark; which
-no whit advanced the matter. Then there was another experiment. Amy
-Duny was brought to one of the children whose eyes were blinded. The
-child was presently touched by another person, “which produced the
-same effect as the touch of the witch did in the court.” The sceptical
-Keeling and his set now roundly declared the whole business a sham,
-which “put the court and all persons into a stand. But at length
-Mr. Pacy did declare that possibly the maid might be deceived by a
-suspicion that the witch touched her when she did not.” This was the
-very point the sceptics were making, and was anything but an argument
-in reply, though it seems to have been accepted as such. And how to
-suppose, it was urged, that innocent children would tell such terrible
-lies? It was the golden age of the rod; never was there fitter occasion
-for its use. Once fancies a few strokes had produced remarkable
-confessions from the innocents! However, the court went on hearing
-evidence. The judge summed up with much seeming impartiality, much
-wooden wisdom, and the usual judicial platitudes, all which after more
-than two centuries you read with considerable irritation. The jury upon
-half an hour’s deliberation returned a verdict of guilty. Next morning
-the children were brought to the judge, “and Mr. Pacy did affirm that
-within less than half an hour after the witches were convicted they
-were all of them restored.” After this, what place was left for doubt?
-“In conclusion the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with
-the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches that they
-should be hanged.” Three days afterwards the poor unfortunates went to
-their death. “They were much urged to confess, but would not.”
-
-Finally, you have this much less tragic business. In the first year
-of Queen Anne’s reign (1702), Richard Hathaway was tried at the
-Surrey Assizes before Lord Chief Justice Holt for falsely accusing
-Sarah Morduck of bewitching him. The offence being a misdemeanour,
-the prisoner had counsel, an advantage not then fully given to those
-charged with felony. The trial reads like one in our own day. The case
-for the Crown had been carefully put together. Possibly the authorities
-were striking at accusations of and prosecutions for Witchcraft.
-Sarah Morduck had been tried and acquitted at Guildford Assizes for
-bewitching Hathaway, whereupon this prosecution had been ordered. Dr.
-Martin, parish minister in Southwark, an able and enlightened divine,
-had saved Sarah from the mob, and so was led on to probe the matter.
-He found Hathaway apparently blind and dumb, but giving his assent
-by a sign to the suggestion that he should scratch Morduck, and so
-(according to the superstition already noted) obtain relief. Dr. Martin
-brought Sarah and a woman of the same height called Johnson to the room
-where the impostor lay, seemingly, at death’s door. Morduck announced
-her willingness to be scratched, and then Johnson’s hand was put into
-his. Hathaway was suspicious, and felt the arm very carefully, whereat
-the parson “spoke to him somewhat eagerly: If you will not scratch I
-will begone.” Whereupon he clawed so lustily that Johnson near fainted.
-She was forthwith hustled out of the room and Morduck pushed forward;
-but the rogue, fearing a trap, lay quiet till Dr. Martin encouraged him
-by simulated admiration. Then he opened wide his eyes, “caught hold of
-the apron of Sarah Morduck, and looked her in the face,” thus implying
-that his supposed scratching of her had restored his eyesight. Being
-informed of his blunder he “seemed much cast down,” but his native
-impudence soon asserting itself, he gave himself out for worse than
-ever, whilst Sarah Morduck, anxious to be clear at any cost, declared
-that not she but Johnson was the witch. The popular voice roundly
-abused Dr. Martin for a stubborn sceptic. Charges of bribery against
-him, as well as against the judge and jury who had acquitted Morduck,
-were freely bandied about. Dr. Martin had got Bateman a friend of his
-to see Hathaway, one of whose symptoms was the vomiting of pins. His
-evidence was that the rogue scattered the pins about the room by
-sleight of hand; Bateman had taken several parcels of them, almost by
-force, out of his pocket. Kensy, a surgeon, further told how Hathaway,
-being committed to his care, at first would neither eat nor drink.
-Kensy being afraid that he would starve himself to death sooner than
-have his cheat discovered, arranged a pretended quarrel with his maid
-Baker, who supplied the patient with food as if against his orders.
-Indeed, she plied him so well with meat and drink that, so she told
-the court, “he was very merry and danced about, and took the tongs
-and played upon them, but after that he was mightily sick and vomited
-sadly”--but there were no pins and needles! She further told how four
-gentlemen, privily stored away in the buttery and coal-hole, witnessed
-Hathaway’s gastronomic feats. Serjeant Jenner for the defence called
-several witnesses, who testified to the prisoner’s abstinence from
-food for quite miraculous periods. The force of this evidence was much
-shaken by the pertinent cross-examination of the judge, who asked the
-jury in his summing up, “Whether you have any evidence to induce you
-to believe it to be in the power of all the witches in the world, or
-all the Devils in Hell, to fast beyond the usual time that nature will
-allow: they cannot invert the order of nature.” The jury, “without
-going from the bar, brought him in Guilty.” He was sentenced to a fine,
-a sound flogging, the pillory, and imprisonment with hard labour. The
-last conviction for Witchcraft in England was that of Jane Wenham,
-at Hertford, in 1712. She was respited by the judge and afterwards
-pardoned. The case is not here reported.
-
-These trials throw a curious light on the ideas of the time;
-unfortunately they exhibit human nature in some of its worst aspects.
-The victims were women, old, poor, helpless, and the persecution to
-which they were subjected was due partly to superstition, partly to
-that delight in cruelty so strong in the natural man. The “confessions”
-of the accused are easily accounted for. The popular beliefs so
-impressed their imaginations that they believed in their own malevolent
-power, also the terror they inspired lacked not charm, it procured
-them consideration, some money, even some protection. Not seldom
-their “confessions” were merely terrified assents to statements made
-about them by witch-finders, clergymen, and justices. And the judges?
-Sometimes, alas! they callously administered a law in which they had no
-belief. Is there not still something inexplicable? Well, such things as
-mesmerism, thought-reading, and so forth exhibit remarkable phenomena.
-A former age ascribed all to Satan: we believe them natural though we
-cannot as yet solve all their riddles. I must add that the ancient
-popular horror of witches is partly explained by the hideous and
-grotesque details given at the trials, but those obscenities I dare not
-reproduce.
-
-
-
-
-A Pair of Parricides
-
-    The State Trials--The Dry Bones of Romance--Pictures of
-    the Past--Their Value for the Present--The Case of Philip
-    Standsfield--The Place of the Tragedy--The Night of the
-    Murder--The Scene in Morham Kirk--The Trial--“The Bluidy
-    Advocate--Mackenzie”--The Fate of Standsfield--The Case
-    of Mary Blandy, Spinster--The Villain of the Piece--The
-    Maid’s Gossip--Death of Mr. Blandy--The “Angel” Inn at
-    Henley-on-Thames--The Defence--Miss Blandy’s Exit.
-
-
-There is a new series of _State Trials_ continuing the old, and edited
-with a skill and completeness altogether lacking in its predecessor;
-yet its formal correctness gives an impression of dulness. You
-think with regret of Howell’s thirty-three huge volumes, that vast
-magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst
-in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and
-how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug
-comfort of our time! People shuddered of yore; did they yawn quite so
-often? Howell and the folk he edits knew how to tell a story. Judges,
-too, were not wont to exclude interesting detail for that it wasn’t
-evidence, and the compilers did not end with a man’s condemnation.
-They had too keen a sense of what was relished of the general: the
-last confession and dying speech, the exit on the scaffold or from the
-cart, are told with infinite gusto. What a terrible test earth’s great
-unfortunates underwent! Sir Thomas More’s delicate fencing with his
-judges, the exquisite courtesy wherewith he bade them farewell, make
-but half the record; you must hear the strange gaiety which flashed
-in the condemned cell and by the block ere you learn the man’s true
-nature. And to know Raleigh you must see him at Winchester under the
-brutal insults of Coke; “Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face
-but a Spanish heart;” again, “I thou thee, thou traitor!” and at Palace
-Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to
-hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the
-ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly
-dressed, stately, and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture in
-his Elizabethan warship sweeping the Spanish Main. Time would fail
-to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for
-the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to
-Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close packed, badly
-printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than
-cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart’s
-ending has a finer hold than Froude’s magnificent and highly decorated
-picture--Study at first hand “Bloody Jeffreys,” his slogging of Titus
-Oates, with that unabashed rascal’s replies during his trial for
-perjury; or again, my Lord’s brilliant though brutal cross-examination
-of Dunn in the “Lady” Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous
-Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay’s wealth of vituperative
-rhetoric, in comparison, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you
-will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of
-Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in
-1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson’s
-master-hand has limned in _Weir of Hermiston_.
-
-But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors
-are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance,
-in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with
-stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic
-necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway
-in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from
-meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I
-deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals
-have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of
-long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the _vie intime_ of a
-past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master
-and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed,
-what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls
-the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! _Benefit of
-clergy_ meets you at every turn, the _Peine Fort et Dure_ is explained
-with horrible minuteness, the lore of _Ship Money_ as well as of
-_Impressment of Seamen_ is all there. Also is an occasional touch of
-farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old
-tomes?
-
-Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then
-purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In
-a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice,
-but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is
-“a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however
-antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So,
-partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in
-altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots
-of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.
-
-The first is the case of Philip Standsfield, tried at Edinburgh, in
-1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New
-Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it
-lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There
-is a fine mansion-house about a century old in the midst of a well
-wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as
-_dulcia arva_ as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its present name
-thus: Colonel Charteris, infamed (in the phrase of Arbuthnot’s famous
-epitaph) for the “undeviating pravity of his manners” (hence lashed by
-Pope in many a stinging line), purchased it early in the last century
-and re-named it from the seat of his family in Nithsdale. Through him
-it passed by descent to the house of Wemyss, still its owners. Amongst
-its trees and its waters the place lies away from the beaten track and
-is now as charmingly peaceful a spot as you shall anywhere discover.
-Name gone and aspect changed, local tradition has but a vague memory
-of the two-centuries-old tragedy whereof it was the centre.
-
-Sir James Standsfield, an Englishman by birth, had married a Scots lady
-and spent most of his life in Scotland. After the Restoration he had
-established a successful cloth factory at the place called New Mills,
-and there lived, a prosperous gentleman. But he had much domestic
-trouble chiefly from the conduct of his eldest son Philip, who, though
-well brought up, led a wild life. Whilst “this profligate youth” (so
-Wodrow, who tells the story, dubs him) was a student at the University
-of St. Andrews, curiosity or mischief led him to attend a conventicle
-where godly Mr. John Welch was holding forth. Using a chance loaf as
-a missile, he smote the astonished divine, who, failing to discover
-the culprit, was moved to prophecy. “There would be,” he thundered,
-“more present at the death of him who did it, than were hearing him
-that day; and the multitude was not small.” Graver matters than this
-freak stained the lad’s later career. Serving abroad in the Scots
-regiment, he had been condemned to death at Treves, but had escaped by
-flight. Certain notorious villainies had also made him familiar with
-the interior of the Marshalsea and the prisons of Brussels, Antwerp,
-and Orleans. Sir James at last was moved to disinherit him in favour
-of his second son John. Partly cause and partly effect of this,
-Philip was given to cursing his father in most extravagant terms (of
-itself a capital offence according to old Scots law); he affirmed his
-parent “girned upon him like a sheep’s head in a tongs;” on several
-occasions he had even attempted that parent’s life: all which is set
-forth at great length in the “ditty” or indictment upon which he was
-tried. No doubt Sir James went in considerable fear of his unnatural
-son. A certain Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, advocate, testifies that eight
-days before the end he met the old gentleman in the Parliament Close,
-Edinburgh, whereupon “the defunct invited him to take his morning
-draught.” As they partook Sir James bemoaned his domestic troubles.
-“Yes,” said Mackenzie, but why had he disherished his son? And the
-defunct answered: “Ye do not know my son, for he is the greatest
-debauch in the earth. And that which troubles me most is that he twice
-attempted my own person.”
-
-Upon the last Saturday of November 1687, the elder Standsfield
-travelled from Edinburgh to New Mills in company with Mr. John
-Bell, minister of the Gospel, who was to officiate the next day in
-Morham Church (Morham is a secluded parish on the lower slope of the
-Lammermoors, some three miles south-west of New Mills; the church
-plays an important part in what follows). Arrived at New Mills the
-pair supped together, thereafter the host accompanied his guest to
-his chamber, where he sat talking “pertinently and to good purpose”
-till about ten o’clock. Left alone, our divine gat him to bed, but had
-scarce fallen asleep when he awoke in terror, for a terrible cry rang
-through the silence of the winter night. A confused murmur of voices
-and a noise of folk moving about succeeded. Mr. Bell incontinently
-set all down to “evil wicked spirits,” so having seen to the bolts of
-his chamber door, and having fortified his timid soul with prayers, he
-huddled in bed again; but the voices and noises continuing outside the
-house he crept to the window, where peering out he perceived nought
-in the darkness. The noises died away across the garden towards the
-river, and Bell lay quaking till the morning. An hour after day Philip
-came to his chamber to ask if his father had been there, for he had
-been seeking him upon the banks of the water. “Why on the banks of
-that water?” queried Bell in natural amazement. Without answer Philip
-hurriedly left the room. Later that same Sunday morning a certain
-John Topping coming from Monkrig to New Mills, along the bank of the
-Tyne, saw a man’s body floating on the water. Philip, drawn to the
-spot by some terrible fascination, was looking on (you picture his
-face). “Whose body was it?” asked the horror-struck Topping, but
-Philip replied not. Well _he_ knew it was his father’s corpse. It was
-noted that, though a hard frosty morning, the bank was “all beaten
-to mash with feet and the ground very open and mellow.” The dead man
-being presently dragged forth and carried home was refused entry by
-Philip into the house so late his own, “for he had not died like a man
-but like a beast,”--the suggestion being that his father had drowned
-himself,--and so the poor remains must rest in the woollen mill, and
-then in a cellar “where there was very little light.” The gossips
-retailed unseemly fragments of scandal, as “within an hour after his
-father’s body was brought from the water, he got the buckles from
-his father’s shoes and put them in his;” and again, there is note
-of a hideous and sordid quarrel between Lady Standsfield and Janet
-Johnstoun, “who was his own concubine,” so the prosecution averred,
-“about some remains of the Holland of the woonding-sheet,” with some
-incriminating words of Philip that accompanied.
-
-I now take up the story as given by Umphrey Spurway, described as an
-Englishman and clothier at New Mills. His suspicions caused him to
-write to Edinburgh that the Lord Advocate might be warned. Philip
-lost no time in trying to prevent an inquiry. At three or four of the
-clock on Monday morning Spurway, coming out of his house, saw “great
-lights at Sir James’ Gate;” grouped round were men and horses. He was
-told they were taking away the body to be buried at Morham, whereat
-honest Umphrey, much disturbed at this suspicious haste, sighed for the
-“crowner’s quest law” of his fatherland. But on the next Tuesday night
-after he had gone to bed a party of five men, two of them surgeons,
-came post haste to his house from Edinburgh, and showing him an order
-“from my Lord Advocat for the taking up again the body of Sir James
-Standsfield,” bid him rise and come. Philip also must go with the party
-to Morham. Here the grave was opened, the body taken out and carried
-into the church, where the surgeons made their examination, which
-clearly pointed to death by strangulation not by drowning (possibly
-it struck Spurway as an odd use for a church; it had not seemed so
-to a presbyterian Scot of the period). The dead being re-dressed in
-his grave clothes must now be set back in his coffin. A terrible thing
-happened. According to Scots custom the nearest relative must lift the
-body, and so Philip took the head, when lo! the corpse gushed forth
-blood on his hands! He dropped the head--the “considerable noise” it
-made in falling is noted by one of the surgeons--frantically essayed
-to wipe off the blood on his clothes, and with frenzied cries of “Lord
-have mercy upon me, Lord have mercy upon us!” fell half swooning across
-a seat. Strong cordials were administered, and in time he regained his
-sullen composure.
-
-A strange scene to ponder over, but how terrible to witness! Think of
-it! The lonely church on the Lammermoors, the dead vast and middle
-of the dreary night (November 30, 1687), the murdered man, and the
-Parricide’s confession (it is so set forth in the “ditty”) wrung from
-him (as all believed) by the direct interposition of Providence. What
-fiction ever equalled this gruesome horror? Even his mother, who had
-sided with him against the father, scarce professed to believe his
-innocence. “What if they should put her bairn in prison?” she wailed.
-“Her bairn” was soon hard and fast in the gloomy old Tolbooth of
-Edinburgh, to which, as the _Heart of Midlothian_, Scott’s novel was in
-future days to give a world-wide fame.
-
-The trial came on February 6 ensuing. In Scotland there is no inquest
-or public magisterial examination to discount the interest of the
-story, and the crowd that listened in the Parliament House to the
-evidence already detailed had their bellyful of surprises and horrors.
-The Crown had still in reserve this testimony, sensational and deadly.
-The prosecution proposed to call James Thomson, a boy of thirteen, and
-Anna Mark, a girl of ten. Their tender years were objected. My Lords,
-declining to receive them as witnesses, oddly enough consented at the
-request of the jury to take their declaration. The boy told how Philip
-came to his father’s house on the night of the murder. The lad was
-hurried off to bed, but listened whilst the panel, Janet Johnstoun,
-already mentioned, and his father and mother softly whispered together
-for a long time, until Philip’s rage got the better of his discretion,
-and he loudly cursed his father and threatened his life. Next Philip
-and Janet left the house, and in the dead of night his father and
-mother followed. After two hours they crept back again; and the boy,
-supposed to be sleeping, heard them whisper to each other the story of
-the murder, how Philip guarded the chamber door “with a drawn sword
-and a bendit pistol,” how it was strange a man should die so soon, how
-they carried the body to the water and threw it in, and how his mother
-ever since was afraid to stay alone in the house after nightfall. The
-evidence of Anna Mark was as to certain criminating words used by her
-mother Janet Johnstoun.
-
-Up to this time the panel had been defended by four eminent advocates
-mercifully appointed thereto by the Privy Council; there had been the
-usual Allegations, Replyes, and Duplies, with frequent citations from
-Mattheus, Carpzovius, Muscard, and the other fossils, as to the matters
-contained in the “ditty” (indictment), and they had strenuously fought
-for him till now, but after the statement of the children they retired.
-Then Sir George Mackenzie rose to reply for the Crown. Famous in his
-own day, his name is not yet forgotten. He was “the bluidy advocate
-Mackenzie” of Covenanting legend and tradition, one of the figures in
-Wandering Willie’s tale in _Redgauntlet_ (“who for his worldly wit
-and wisdom had been to the rest as a god”). He had been Lord Advocate
-already, and was presently to be Lord Advocate again. Nominally but
-second counsel he seems to have conducted the whole prosecution. He had
-a strong case, and he made the most of it. Passionate invective and
-prejudicial matter were mixed with legal argument. Cultured politician
-and jurist as he was, he dwelt with terrible emphasis on the scene in
-Morham kirk. “God Almighty Himself was pleased to bear a share in
-the testimonies which we produce.” Nor was the children’s testimony
-forgotten. “I need not fortifie so pregnant a probation.” No! yet he
-omitted not to protest for “an Assize of Error against the inquest
-in the case they should assoilzie the pannal”--a plain intimation to
-jury that if they found Philip Standsfield “not guilty” they were
-liable to be prosecuted for an unjust verdict. But how to doubt after
-such evidence? The jury straightway declared the panel guilty, and my
-lords pronounced a sentence of picturesque barbarity. Standsfield was
-to be hanged at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh, his tongue cut out and
-burned upon the scaffold, his right hand fixed above the east port
-of Haddington, and his dead body hung in chains upon the Gallow Lee
-betwixt Leith and Edinburgh, his name disgraced for ever, and all his
-property forfeited to the Crown. According to the old Scots custom the
-sentence was given “by the mouth of John Leslie, dempster of court”--an
-office held along with that of hangman. “Which is pronounced for doom”
-was the formula wherewith he concluded.
-
-On February 15 Standsfield though led to the scaffold was reprieved
-for eight days “at the priest’s desire, who had been tampering to
-turn Papist” (one remembers these were the last days of James II.,
-or as they called him in Scotland, James VII.’s reign). Nothing came
-of the delay, and when finally brought out on the 24th “he called
-for Presbyterian ministers.” Through some slipping of the rope, the
-execution was bungled; finally the hangman strangled his patient. The
-“near resemblance of his father’s death” is noted by an eye-witness.
-“Yet Edmund was beloved.” Leave was asked to bury the remains. One
-fancies this was on the part of Lady Standsfield, regarding whose
-complicity and doting fondness, strange stories were current. The
-prayer was refused, but the body was found lying in a ditch a few days
-after, and again the gossips (with a truly impious desire to “force the
-hand” of Providence) saw a likeness to the father’s end. Once more the
-body was taken down and presently vanished.
-
-Lord Fountainhall, a contempory of Standsfield, and Sir Walter Scott,
-both Scots lawyers of high official position, thought the evidence of
-Standsfield’s guilt not altogether conclusive, and believed something
-might be urged for the alternative theory of suicide. Whilst venturing
-to differ, I note the opinion of such eminent authorities with all
-respect.
-
-Standsfield maintained his innocence to the last. Three servants of
-his father’s--two men and a woman--were seized and tortured with the
-thumbikins. They confessed nothing. Now, torture was frequently used
-in old Scots criminal procedure, but if you did not confess you were
-almost held to have proved your innocence.
-
-I cannot discover the after fate of these servants, and probably
-they were banished--a favourite method with the Scots authorities
-for getting rid of objectionable characters whose guilt was not
-sufficiently proved.
-
-The second case, not so romantic albeit a love-story is woven through
-its tangled threads, is that of Mary Blandy, spinster, tried at
-Oxford in 1752, before two of the Barons of the Exchequer, for the
-murder of her father, Francis Blandy, attorney, and town clerk of
-Henley-on-Thames. Prosecuting counsel described her as “genteel,
-agreeable, sprightly, sensible.” She was an only child. Her sire
-being well off she seemed an eligible match, and yet wooers tarried.
-Some years before the murder, the villain of the piece, William Henry
-Cranstoun, a younger son of the Scots Lord Cranstoun and an officer
-recruiting at Henley for the army, comes on the scene. Contemporary
-gossip paints him the blackest colour. “His shape no ways genteel, his
-legs clumsy, he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner.” He was
-remarkable for his dulness; he was dissipated and poverty-stricken.
-More fatal than all he had a wife and child in Scotland, though he
-brazenly declared the marriage invalid spite the judgment of the Scots
-courts in its favour. Our respectable attorney, upon discovering these
-facts, gave the Captain, as he was called, the cold shoulder. The
-prospect of a match with a Lord’s son was too much for Miss Blandy, now
-over thirty, and she was ready to believe any ridiculous yarn he spun
-about his northern entanglements. Fired by an exaggerated idea of old
-Blandy’s riches, he planned his death, and found in the daughter an
-agent and, as the prosecution averred, an accomplice.
-
-The way was prepared by a cunning use of popular superstitions.
-Mysterious sounds of music were heard about; at least Cranstoun said
-so; indeed, it was afterwards alleged he “hired a band to play under
-the windows.” If any one asked “What then?” he whispered “that a
-wise woman, one Mrs. Morgan, in Scotland,” had assured him that such
-was a sign of death to the head of the house within twelve months.
-The Captain further alleged that he held the gift of second sight
-and had seen the worthy attorney’s ghost; all which, being carefully
-reported to the servants by Miss Blandy raised a pleasing horror in the
-kitchen. Cranstoun, from necessity or prudence, left Henley before the
-diabolical work began in earnest, but he supplied Mary with arsenic
-in powder, which she administered to her father for many months. The
-doses were so immoderate that the unfortunate man’s teeth dropped whole
-from their sockets, whereat the undutiful daughter “damn’d him for a
-toothless old rogue and wished him to hell.” Cranstoun, under the guise
-of a present of Scotch pebbles, sent her some more arsenic, nominally
-to rub them with. In the accompanying letter, July 18, 1751, he
-glowingly touched on the beauties of Scotland as an inducement to her,
-it was supposed, to make haste. Rather zealous than discreet, she near
-poisoned Anne Emmett, the charwoman, by misadventure, but brought her
-round again with great quantities of sack whey and thin mutton broth,
-sovereign remedies against arsenic.
-
-Her father gradually became desperately ill. Susannah Gunnell,
-maidservant perceiving a white powder at the bottom of a dish she was
-cleaning had it preserved. It proved to be arsenic, and was produced
-at the trial. Susannah actually told Mr. Blandy he was being poisoned;
-but he only remarked, “Poor lovesick girl! what will not a woman do for
-the man she loves?” Both master and maid fixed the chief, perhaps the
-whole, guilt on Cranstoun, the father confining himself to dropping
-some strong hints to his daughter, which made her throw Cranstoun’s
-letters and the remainder of the poison on the fire, wherefrom the drug
-was in secret rescued and preserved by the servants.
-
-Mr. Blandy was now hopelessly ill, and though experienced doctors
-were at length called in, he expired on Wednesday, August 14, 1751.
-The sordid tragedy gets its most pathetic and highest touch from the
-attempts made by the dying man to shield his daughter and to hinder
-her from incriminating admissions which under excitement and (one
-hopes) remorse she began to make. And in his last hours he spoke to her
-words of pardon and solace. That night and again on Thursday morning
-the daughter made some distracted efforts to escape. “I ran out of
-the house and over the bridge, and had nothing on but a half-sack and
-petticoat without a hoop--my petticoats hanging about me.” But now
-all Henley was crowded round the dwelling to watch the development of
-events. The mob pressed after the distracted girl, who took refuge
-at the sign of the Angel, a small inn just across the bridge. “They
-were going to open her father,” she said, and “she could not bear the
-house.” She was taken home and presently committed to Oxford Gaol to
-await her trial. Here she was visited by the high sheriff, who “told me
-by order of the higher powers he must put an iron on me. I submitted as
-I always do to the higher powers” (she had little choice). Spite her
-terrible position and these indignities she behaved with calmness and
-courage.
-
-The trial, which lasted twelve hours, took place on February 29, 1752,
-in the Divinity School of the University. The prisoner was “sedate
-and composed without levity or dejection.” Accused of felony, she had
-properly counsel only for points of law, but at her request they were
-allowed to examine and cross-examine the witnesses. Herself spoke
-a defence possibly prepared by her advisers, for though the style
-be artless, the reasoning is exceeding ingenious. She admitted she
-was passionate and thus accounted for some hasty expressions; the
-malevolence of servants had exaggerated these. Betty Binfield, one of
-the maids, was credibly reported to have said of her, “she should be
-glad to see the black bitch go up the ladder to be hanged.” But the
-powder? Impossible to deny she had administered that. “I gave it to
-procure his love.” Cranstoun, she affirmed, had sent it from Scotland,
-assuring her that it would so work, and Scotland, one notes, seemed to
-everybody “the shores of old romance,” the home of magic incantations
-and mysterious charms. It was powerfully objected that Francis Blandy
-had never failed in love to his daughter, but she replied that the drug
-was given to reconcile her father to Cranstoun. She granted he meant to
-kill the old man in hopes to get his money, and she was the agent, but
-(she asserted) the innocent agent, of his wicked purpose. This theory
-though the best available was beset with difficulties. She had made
-many incriminating statements, there was the long time over which the
-doses had been spread, there was her knowledge of its effects on Anne
-Emmett the charwoman, there was the destruction of Cranstoun’s letters,
-the production of which would have conclusively shown the exact measure
-in which guilty knowledge was shared. Finally, there was the attempt to
-destroy the powder. Bathurst, leading counsel for the Crown, delivered
-two highly rhetorical speeches, “drawing floods of tears from the most
-learned audience that perhaps ever attended an English Provincial
-Tribunal.” The jury after some five minutes’ consultation in the box
-returned a verdict of “guilty,” which the prisoner received with
-perfect composure. All she asked was a little time “till I can settle
-my affairs and make my peace with God,” and this was readily granted.
-She was left in prison five weeks.
-
-The case continued to excite enormous interest, increased by an
-account which she issued from prison of her father’s death and her
-relations with Cranstoun. She was constant in her professions of
-innocence, “nor did anything during the whole course of her confinement
-so extremely shock her as the charge of infidelity which some
-uncharitable persons a little before her death brought against her.”
-Some were convinced and denied her guilt, “as if,” said Horace Walpole,
-“a woman who would not stick at parricide would scruple a lie.” Others
-said she had hopes of pardon “from the Honour she had formerly had of
-dancing for several nights with the late P----e of W----s, and being
-personally known to the most sweet-tempered P--ess in the world.” The
-press swarmed with pamphlets. The Cranstoun correspondence, alleged not
-destroyed, was published--a very palpable Grub Street forgery! and a
-tragedy, _The Fair Parricide_, dismal in every sense, was inflicted on
-the world. The last scene of all was on April 6, 1752. “Miss Blandy
-suffered in a black bombazine short sack and petticoat, with a clean
-white handkerchief drawn over her face. Her hands were tied together
-with a strong black riband, and her feet at her own request almost
-touched the ground” (“Gentlemen, don’t hang me high for the sake of
-decency,” an illustration of British prudery which has escaped the
-notice of French critics). She mounted the ladder with some hesitation.
-“I am afraid I shall fall.” For the last time she declared her
-innocence, and soon all was over. “The number of people attending her
-execution was computed at about 5000, many of whom, and particularly
-several gentlemen of the university, were observed to shed tears”
-(tender-hearted “gentlemen of the university”!) “In about half an hour
-the body was cut down and carried through the crowd upon the shoulders
-of a man with her legs exposed very indecently.” Late the same night
-she was laid beside her father and mother in Henley Church.
-
-Cranstoun fled from justice and was outlawed. In December that same
-year he died in Flanders.
-
-
-
-
-Some Disused Roads to Matrimony
-
-    Marriage according to the Canon Law--The English
-    Law--Peculiars--The Fleet Chapel--Marriage Houses--“The Bishop of
-    Hell”--Ludgate Hill in the Olden Time--Marriages Wholesale--The
-    Parsons of the Fleet--Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act--The Fleet
-    Registers--Keith’s Chapel in May Fair--The Savoy Chapel--The Scots
-    Marriage Law--The Strange Case of Joseph Atkinson--Gretna Green in
-    Romance and Reality--The Priests--Their Clients--A Pair of Lord
-    High Chancellors--Lord Brougham’s Marriage Act--The Decay of the
-    Picturesque.
-
-
-“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The marrying in the
-Fleet is the beginning of eternal woe.” So scribbled (1736) Walter
-Wyatt, a Fleet Parson, in one of his note-books. He and his likes are
-long vanished, and his successor the blacksmith priest (in truth he was
-neither one nor other) of Gretna is also gone; yet their story is no
-less entertaining than instructive, and here I set it forth.
-
-Some prefatory matter is necessary for the right understanding of
-what follows. Marriage, whatever else it may or may not be, is a
-contract of two consenting minds; but at an early age the church put
-forth the doctrine that it was likewise a sacrament which could be
-administered by the contracting parties to each other. Pope Innocent
-III., in 1215, first ordained--so some authorities say--that marriages
-must be celebrated in church; but it was not yet decreed that other
-and simpler methods were without effect. According to the canon law,
-“espousals” were of two kinds: _sponsalia per verba de præsenti_--which
-was an agreement to marry forthwith; and _sponsalia per verba de
-futuro_--which was a contract to wed at a future time. Consummation
-gave number two the effect of number one, and civilly that effect was
-the same as of duly celebrated nuptials; inasmuch as the church, while
-urging the religious ceremony upon the faithful as the sole proper
-method, admitted the validity of the others--_quod non fieri debit
-id factum valeat_ (so the maxim ran). The common law adopting this,
-held that (1) marriage might be celebrated with the full rites of the
-church; or (2) that the parties might take each other for man and
-wife; or (3), which obviously followed, that a priest might perform
-the ceremony outside the church, or without the full ceremonial--with
-maimed rites, so to speak. Whatever penalties were incurred by
-following other than the first way the marriage itself held good.
-
-I must here note that in 1844, in the case of _The Queen against
-Millis_, the House of Lords _seemed_ to decide that there could not
-have been a valid marriage in England, even before Lord Hardwicke’s
-Act, which in 1753 completely changed the law, in the absence of an
-ordained ecclesiastic. The arguments and the judgment fill the half
-of one of Clark and Finnelly’s bulky volumes, and never was matter
-more thoroughly threshed, and winnowed, and garnered. The House was
-equally divided; and the opinion of the Irish Court of Queen’s Bench,
-which maintained the necessity of the priest’s presence, was affirmed.
-The real explanation, I think, is that, though the old canon law and
-the old common law were as I have stated, yet English folk had got so
-much into the habit of calling in the Parson that his presence came to
-be regarded as essential. The parties, even when they disobeyed the
-church by leaving undone much they were ordered to do, would still have
-“something religious” about the ceremony. In 1563 the Council of Trent
-declared such marriages invalid as were not duly celebrated in church;
-but Elizabeth’s reign was already five years gone, both England and
-Scotland had broken decisively with the old faith, and the Council’s
-decrees had no force here.
-
-In England both church and state kept tinkering the Marriage Laws. In
-1603 the Convocation for the Province of Canterbury declared that no
-minister shall solemnise matrimony without banns or licence upon pain
-of suspension for three years. Also, all marriages were to be in the
-parish church between eight and twelve in the forenoon. Nothing so far
-affected the validity of the business; and “clandestine marriages,”
-as they were called, became frequent. In 1695, an Act of William III.
-fined the Parson who assisted at such couplings one hundred pounds for
-the first offence, and for the second suspended him for three years.
-This enactment was followed almost immediately by another, which
-mulcted the clergyman who celebrated or permitted any such marriage in
-his church as well as the bridegroom and the clerk. The main object
-of this legislation was to prevent the loss of duties payable upon
-regularly performed marriages; but it strengthened ecclesiastical
-discipline.
-
-Thus your correct wedding, then as now, had its tedious preliminaries;
-but the fashion of the time imposed some other burdens. There was
-inordinate feasting with music and gifts and altogether much expense
-and delay. Poor folk could ill afford the business; now and again
-the rich desired a private ceremony; here and there young people
-sighed for a runaway match. Also, outside this trim and commonplace
-century the nation’s life had not that smoothness which seems to us
-such a matter of course. Passion was stronger and worse disciplined;
-law, though harsh, was slow and uncertain. How tempting, then, the
-inducement to needy persons to marry cheaply and without ceremony! Now,
-London had a number of places of worship called _Peculiars_, which,
-as royal chapels, possessions of the Lord Mayor and alderman, or what
-not, claimed, rightly or wrongly, exemption from the visitation of
-the ordinary. These were just the places for irregular or clandestine
-marriages. Peculiars or not, as many as ninety chapels favoured such
-affairs. Chief among them were the Savoy, the Minories, Mayfair
-Chapel, and (above all) the Fleet, which--from a very early date
-to half a century ago--was a famous prison especially for debtors,
-standing on what is now the east side of Farringdon Street. It had
-a chapel where marriages were properly solemnised by 1613, and (it
-may be) earlier; but the records are somewhat scanty. Now, a number
-of dissolute Parsons were “fleeted” (as the old phrase ran) for one
-cause or another, and some might live outside the walls but within the
-_rules_ or _liberties of the Fleet_, as the ground about the prison was
-called. These obtained the use of the chapel, where, for a reasonable
-consideration, they were willing to couple any brace forthwith. What
-terror had the law for them? Men already in hold for debt laughed at a
-fine, and suspension was a process slow and like to be ineffectual at
-the last. The church feebly tried to exercise discipline. On June 4,
-1702, the Bishop of London held a visitation _in carcere vulgo vocat’
-ye Fleet in civitate London_. He found one Jeronimus Alley coupling
-clients at a great rate. ’Twas hinted that Jeronimus was not a Parson
-at all, and proof of his ordination was demanded; “but Mr. Alley soon
-afterwards fled from _ye said prison_ and never exhibited his orders.”
-Another record says that he obtained “some other preferment” (probably
-he was playing the like game elsewhere).
-
-The legislature, in despair, as it might seem, now struck at more
-responsible heads. In 1712 a statute (10 Ann. c. 19) imposed the
-penalty of a hundred pounds on keepers of gaols permitting marriage
-without banns or licence within their walls. This closed the Fleet
-Chapel to such nuptials, but private houses did just as well.
-Broken-down Parsons, bond or free, were soon plentiful as blackberries;
-and taverns stood at every corner; so at the “Two Fighting Men and
-Walnut Tree,” at “The Green Canister,” at “The Bull and Garter,” at
-“The Noah’s Ark,” at “The Horseshoe and Magpie,” at “Jack’s Last
-Shift,” at “The Shepherd and Goat,” at “The Leg” (to name no more),
-a room was fitted up in a sort of caricature of a chapel; and here
-during the ceremony a clock with doubly brazen hands stood ever at one
-of the canonical hours though without it might be midnight or three
-in the morning. A Parson, hired at twenty shillings a week, “hit or
-miss,” as ’twas curiously put, attended. The business was mostly done
-on Sundays, Thursdays, and Fridays; but ready, ay ready, was the word.
-The landlord or a servingman played clerk, and what more was wanted?
-
-There were many orders of Fleet Parsons, some not parsons at all.
-At the top of the tree was the “famous Dr. John Gaynam,” known as
-the “Bishop of Hell:” he made a large income and in his time coupled
-legions; and at the bottom were a parcel of fellows who would marry
-any couple anywhere for anything. The Fleet Parson of standing kept a
-pocket-book in which he roughly jotted down the particulars of each
-marriage, transcribing the more essential details to a larger register
-at home. Certificates, at a varying charge, were made out from these,
-and the books being thus a source of profit were preserved with a
-certain care. To falsify such documents was child’s play. Little
-accidents (as a birth in the midst of the ceremony) were dissembled
-by inserting the notice of the marriage in some odd corner of a more
-or less ancient record. This antedating of registers was so common
-as almost to deprive them of any value as evidence. Worse still,
-certificates were now and again issued, though there had been no
-marriage. Sometimes the taverners kept registers of their own, but how
-to establish a fixed rule?
-
-Not all the “marriage houses,” as they were called, were taverns. They
-were often distinguished by some touching device: as a pair of clasping
-hands with the legend “Marriages Performed Within.” A feature of the
-system was the _plyer_ or _barker_, who, dressed in ragged and rusty
-black, touted for Parson or publican, or it might be for self, vaunting
-himself the while clerk and register to the Fleet. “These ministers
-of wickedness” (thus, in 1735, a correspondent of _The Grub Street
-Journal_) “ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling and forcing the people to
-some peddling alehouse or a brandy-shop to be married, even on a Sunday
-stopping them as they go to church, and almost tearing their clothes
-off their backs.” If you drove Fleetwards with matrimony in your eye,
-why, then you were fair game:--
-
-  Scarce had the coach discharg’d its trusty fare,
-  But gaping crowds surround th’ amorous pair.
-  The busy plyers make a mighty stir,
-  And whisp’ring, cry, “D’ye want the Parson, Sir?”
-
-Yet the great bulk of Fleet marriages were in their own way orderly
-and respectable. Poor people found them shortest and cheapest. Now and
-again there are glimpses of rich or high-born couples: as, in 1744,
-the Hon. H. Fox with Georgina Caroline, eldest daughter of Charles,
-second Duke of Richmond, of which union Charles James was issue. One
-odd species was a parish wedding: the churchwardens thought it an
-ingenious device to bribe some blind or halting youth, the burden of a
-neighbouring parish, to marry a female pauper chargeable to them; for,
-being a wife she immediately acquired her husband’s settlement, and
-they were rid of her. In one case they gave forty shillings and paid
-the expense of a Fleet marriage; the rag, tag, and bobtail attended
-in great numbers and a mighty racket was the result. According to the
-law then and long after, a woman by marrying transferred the burden
-of her debts to her husband. So some desperate spinsters hied them
-Fleetwards to dish their creditors; plyer or Parson soon fished up a
-man; and though, under different _aliases_, he were already wived like
-the Turk, what mattered it? The wife had her “lines,” and how to prove
-the thing a sham? Husbands, again, had a reasonable horror of their
-wives’ antenuptial obligations. An old superstition, widely prevalent
-in England, was that if you took nothing by your bride you escaped
-liability. Obviously, then, the thing to do was to marry her in what
-Winifred Jenkins calls “her birthday soot,” or thereabouts. So “the
-woman ran across Ludgate Hill in a shift,” for thus was her state of
-destitution made patent to all beholders.
-
-When the royal fleet came in, the crews, “panged” full of gold and
-glory, made straight for the taverns of Ratcliffe Highway, and of
-them, there footing it with their Polls and Molls, some one asked,
-“Why not get married?” Why not, indeed? Coaches are fetched; the party
-make off to the Fleet; plyers, Parsons, and publicans, all welcome
-them with open arms; the knots are tied in less than no time; there
-is punch with the officiating cleric; the unblushing fair are crammed
-into the coaches; Jack, his pocket lighter, his brain heavier, climbs
-up on the box or holds on behind; the populace acclaims the procession
-with old shoes, dead cats, and whatever Fleet Ditch filth comes handy;
-and so back to their native _Radcliffe_, to spend their honeymoon in
-“fiddling, piping, jigging, eating,” and to end the bout with a divorce
-even less ceremonious than their nuptials. “It is a common thing,”
-reports a tavern-keeper of that sea-boys’ paradise, “when a fleet comes
-in to have two or three hundred marriages in a week’s time among the
-sailors.”
-
-The work was mostly done cheap: the Parson took what he could get, and
-every one concerned must have his little bit. Thus, “the turnkey had
-a shilling, Boyce (the acting clerk) had a shilling, the plyer had a
-shilling, and the Parson had three and sixpence”--the total amounting
-to six shillings and sixpence. This was a fair average, though now and
-again the big-wigs netted large sums.
-
-A Fleet marriage was as valid as another; but in trials for bigamy
-the rub was: Had there been any marriage at all? Some accused would
-strenuously maintain the negative. In 1737 Richard Leaver was indicted
-at the Old Bailey for this offence; and “I know nothing about the
-wedding,” was his ingenuous plea. “I was fuddled overnight and next
-morning I found myself a-bed with a strange woman and ‘Who are you?
-How came you here?’ says I. ‘O, my dear,’ says she, ‘we were marry’d
-last night at the Fleet.’” More wonderful still was the story told
-by one Dangerfield, charged the preceding year for marrying whilst
-Arabella Fast, his first wife, was still alive. Arabella and he, so
-he asserted, had plotted to blackmail a Parson with whom the lady
-entertained relations all too fond. At ten at night he burst in upon
-them as had been arranged. “‘Hey’ (says I), ‘how came you a-bed with
-my spouse?’ ‘Sir,’ (says he), ‘I only lay with her to keep my back
-warm.’” The explanation lacked probability, and “in the morning” the
-erring divine acknowledged his mistake:--“I must make you a present if
-you can produce a certificate” (he suspected something wrong, you see).
-Dangerfield was gravelled. Not so the resourceful Arabella. “‘For a
-crown I can get a certificate from the Fleet,’ she whispered; and ‘I
-gave her a crown, and in half an hour she brings me a certificate.’”
-The jury acquitted Dangerfield.
-
-The clergyman said to have officiated in both cases was the “famous
-Dr. Gaynam” (so a witness described him), the aforesaid “Bishop of
-Hell.” How could he recollect an individual face, he asked, for had
-he not married his thousands? But it must be right if it was in his
-books: _he_ never altered or falsified _his_ register. “It was as fair
-a register as any church in England can produce. I showed it last night
-to the foreman of the jury, and my Lord Mayor’s clerk at the London
-punch-house” (a noted Fleet tavern): so Gaynam swore at Robert Hussey’s
-trial for bigamy in 1733. A familiar figure was the “Bishop” in Fleet
-taverns and Old Bailey witness-box. At Dangerfield’s trial neither
-counsel nor judge was very complimentary to him; but he was moved not a
-whit; he was used to other than verbal attacks, and some years before
-this he was soundly cudgelled at a wedding--in a dispute about his
-fees, no doubt. “A very lusty, jolly man,” in full canonicals, a trifle
-bespattered from that Fleet Ditch on whose banks he had spent many
-a scandalous year, his florid person verging on over-ripeness, even
-decay, for he vanishes four years later. Was he not ashamed of himself?
-sneered counsel. Whereupon “he (bowing) _video meliora, deteriora
-sequor_.” Don’t you see the reverend rogue complacently mouthing his
-tag? He “flourished” ’twixt 1709 and 1740. On the fly-leaf of one of
-his pocket-books he wrote:
-
-  The Great Good Man w^m fortune may displace,
-  May into scarceness fall, but not disgrace,
-  His sacred person none will dare profane,
-  Poor he may be, but never can be mean,
-  He holds his value with the wise and good,
-  And prostrate seems as great as when he stood.
-
-The personal application was obvious; but alas for fame! Even in Mr.
-Leslie Stephen’s mighty dictionary his record is to seek.
-
-Time would fail to trace the unholy succession of Fleet Parsons. There
-was Edward Ashwell (1734-1743), “a most notorious rogue and impostor.”
-There was Peter Symson (1731-1754), who officiated at the “Old Red
-Hand and Mitre,” headed his certificates G.R., and bounced after
-this fashion:--“Marriages performed by authority by the Reverend Mr.
-Symson, educated at the University of Cambridge, and late Chaplain to
-the Earl of Rothes. N.B.--Without imposition.” Then there was James
-Landow (1737-1743), late Chaplain to His Majesty’s ship _Falkland_,
-who advertised “Marriage with a licence, certificate, and a crown
-stamp at a guinea, at the New Chapel, next door to the China Shop,
-near Fleet Bridge, London.” Of an earlier race was Mr. Robert Elborrow
-(1698-1702): “a very ancient man and is master of ye chapple” (he seems
-to have been really “the Parson of the Fleet”). His chief offence was
-leaving everything to his none too scrupulous clerk, Bassett. There is
-some mention also of the Reverend Mr. Nehemiah Rogers, a prisoner, “but
-goes at large to his living in Essex and all places else.” Probably
-they were glad to get rid of him for “he has struck and boxed ye
-bridegroom in ye Chapple and damned like any com’on souldier.” _Mulli
-praeterea, quos fama obscura recondit._ How to fix the identity of the
-“tall black clergyman” who, hard by “The Cock” in Fleet Market, pressed
-his services on loving couples? Was he one with the “tall Clergyman who
-plies about the Fleet Gate for Weddings,” and who in 1734 was convicted
-“of swearing forty-two Oaths and ordered to pay £4 2_s._”?
-
-In 1753 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (26 Geo. II. cap. 3) put a sudden
-stop to the doings of those worthies. Save in the case of Jews and
-Quakers, all marriages were void unless preceded by banns or licence
-and celebrated according to the rites of the Church of England in a
-church or chapel of that communion. The Priest who assisted at an
-irregular or clandestine marriage was guilty of a felony punishable
-by fourteen years’ transportation. The Bill was violently opposed;
-and, according to Horace Walpole, was crammed down the throats of both
-Houses; but its policy, its effects, as well as later modifications of
-the marriage law, are not for discussion here.
-
-I turn to the registers wherein the doings of the Fleet Parsons are
-more or less carefully recorded. In 1783 most of those still extant
-had got into the hands of Mr. Benjamin Panton. “They weighed more than
-a ton”; were purchased by the Government for £260 6_s._ 6_d._, and
-to-day you may inspect them at Somerset House. There are between two
-and three hundred large registers and a thousand or more pocket-books
-(_temp._ 1674-1753). Not merely are the records of marriages curious
-in themselves, but also they are often accompanied by curious comments
-from the Parson, clerk, taverner, or whoever kept the book. The oddest
-collection is in a volume of date 1727-1754. The writer used Greek
-characters, though his words are English, and is as frank as Pepys,
-and every bit as curious. Here are a few samples from the lot: “Had a
-noise for four hours about the money” was to be expected where there
-were no fixed rates; but “stole my clouthes-brush,” and “left a pott of
-4 penny to pay,” and “ran away with the scertifycate and left a pint
-of wine to pay for,” were surely cases of exceptional roguery. Curious
-couples presented themselves:--“Her eyes very black and he beat about
-ye face very much.” Again, the bridegroom was a boy of eighteen, the
-bride sixty-five, “brought in a coach by four thumping ladies” (the
-original is briefer and coarser) “out of Drury Lane as guests”; and yet
-the Parson had “one shilling only.” He fared even worse at times. Once
-he married a couple, money down, “for half a guinea,” after which “it
-was extorted out of my pocket, and for fear of my life delivered.” Even
-a Fleet Parson had his notion of propriety. “Behav’d very indecent and
-rude to all,” is one entry; and “N.B. behav^d rogueshly. Broke the
-Coachman’s Glass,” is another. Once his reverence, “having a mistrust
-of some Irish roguery,” though the party seemed of better rank than
-usual, asked indiscreet questions. The leader turned on him with the
-true swagger of your brutal Georgian bully. “What was that to me?
-G---- dem me, if I did not immediately marry them he would use me ill;
-in short, apprehending it to be a conspiracy, I found myself obliged
-to marry them _in terrorem_.” Again, he had better luck on another
-occasion: “handsomely entertained,” he records; and of a bride of June
-11, 1727, “the said Rachel, the prettiest woman I ever saw.” (You fancy
-the smirk wherewith he scrawled that single record of the long vanished
-beauty!) He is less complimentary to other clients. His “appear^d a
-rogue” and “two most notorious thieves” had sure procured him a broken
-pate had his patrons known! How gleefully and shamelessly he chronicles
-his bits of sharp practice! “Took them from Brown who was going into
-the next door with them,” was after all merely business; but what
-follows is _not_. In 1729 he married Susannah Hewitt to Abraham Wells,
-a butcher. The thing turned out ill; and in 1736 she came back, and
-suggested annulment by the simple expedient of destroying the record;
-when “I made her believe I did so, for which I had a half a guinea.”
-Nor was there much honour among the crew of thieves. “Total three and
-sixpence, but honest Wigmore kept all the money so farewell him,” is an
-entry by the keeper of a marriage house, whom a notorious Fleet Parson
-had dished. Another is by a substitute for the same divine:--“Wigmore
-being sent for but was drunk, so I was a stopgap.” I confess to a
-sneaking fondness for those entertaining rascals, but enough of their
-pranks.
-
-Of the other places where irregular marriages were celebrated two
-demand some notice. One was Keith’s Chapel in Mayfair, “a very
-bishopric of revenue” to that notorious “marriage broker” the Reverend
-Alexander Keith. His charge was a guinea, and, being strictly
-inclusive, covered “the Licence on a Crown Stamp, Minister’s and
-Clerk’s fees, together with the certificate.” No wonder he did a
-roaring trade! Keith seemed a nobler quarry than the common Fleet
-Parson, and the ecclesiastical authorities pursued him in their courts.
-In October 1742, he was excommunicated: with matchless impudence he
-retorted by excommunicating his persecutors from the Bishop downwards.
-Next year they stuck him in the Fleet; but, through Parsons as reckless
-as himself, he continued to “run” his chapel. In 1749 he made his
-wife’s death an occasion for advertisement: the public was informed
-that the corpse, being embalmed, was removed “to an apothecary’s in
-South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning,
-and is to continue there until Mr. Keith can attend her funeral.”
-Then follows an account of the chapel. One authority states that six
-thousand marriages were celebrated there within twelve months; but
-this seems incredible. That sixty-one couples were united the day
-before Lord Hardwicke’s Act became law is like enough. Here took
-place, in 1752, the famous marriage of the fourth Duke of Hamilton to
-the youngest of the “beautiful Miss Gunnings,” “with a ring of the
-bed curtain half an hour after twelve at night,” as Horace Walpole
-tells. And here, in September 1748, at a like uncanny hour, “handsome
-Tracy was united to the butterman’s daughter in Craven Street.” Lord
-Hardwicke’s Act was elegantly described as “an unhappy stroke of
-fortune” by our enterprising divine. At first he threatened another
-form of competition:--“I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and by God
-I’ll under-bury them all.” But in the end he had to own himself ruined.
-He had scarce anything, he moaned, but bread and water, although he had
-been wont to expend “almost his whole Income (which amounted yearly
-to several Hundred Pounds per Annum) in relieving not only single
-distressed Persons, but even whole Families of wretched Objects of
-Compassion.” The world neither believed nor pitied; and he died in the
-Fleet on December 17, 1758.
-
-Last of all comes the Savoy. There, _The Public Advertiser_ of January
-2, 1754, announced, marriages were performed “with the utmost privacy,
-decency, and regularity, the expense not more than one guinea, the
-five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to
-this chapel, and two by water.” The Reverend John Williamson, “His
-Majesty’s Chaplain of the Savoy,” asserted that as such he could grant
-licences; and despite the Act he went on coupling. In 1755 he married
-the enormous number of one thousand one hundred and ninety; half the
-brides being visibly in an interesting condition. The authorities,
-having warned him time and again to no purpose, at last commenced
-proceedings. But he evaded arrest by skipping over roofs and vanishing
-through back doors, in a manner inexplicable to us to-day; and went
-on issuing licences, while his curate, Mr. Grierson, did the actual
-work at the altar. Grierson, however, was seized and transported for
-fourteen years: then his chief surrendered (1756), stood his trial, and
-received a like sentence; the irregular marriages both had performed
-being declared of no effect.
-
-What now were the amorous to do? Well, there were divers makeshifts.
-Thus, at Southampton (_temp._ 1750), a boat was held ever ready to
-sail for Guernsey with any couple able and willing to pay five pounds.
-Ireland did not impress itself on the lovers’ imagination: it may be
-that the thought of that gruesome middle passage “froze the genial
-current of their souls.” But there was a North as well as a South
-Britain; and--what was more to the purpose--the Scots marriage law
-was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into
-which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any
-time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in
-good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however
-important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the
-Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but
-the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. Couples of
-set purpose confessed their vows, got a small fine inflicted, and
-there was legal evidence of their union! Ecclesiastical discipline was
-strict enough to prevent regularly instituted Scots ministers from
-assisting at such affairs. But any man would do (for, after all, he was
-but a witness), and the first across the Border as well as or better
-than another. Now, by a well-known principle of international law,
-the _lex loci contractus_ governs such contracts: the marriage being
-valid in Scotland where it took place, was also recognised as valid in
-England where its celebration would have been a criminal offence! This
-was curiously illustrated early in the century by the case of Joseph
-Atkinson. The Border, I must explain, had all along been given to
-irregular marriages, and different localities in Scotland were used as
-best suited the parties. Lamberton Toll Bar, N.B., lay four miles north
-of Berwick-on-Tweed; and here our Atkinson did a thriving business in
-the coupling line. One fine day he had gone to Berwick when a couple
-sought his service at the toll-house. A quaint fiction presumes that
-everybody knows the law; but here it turned out that nobody did, for
-the bride and groom instead of uniting themselves before the first
-comer rushed off to Berwick, and were there wedded by Lamberton. And
-not only was the affair a nullity; but the unfortunate coupler was
-sentenced to seven years’ transportation for offending against the
-English marriage laws.
-
-Most of them, however, that went North on marriage bent, took the
-Carlisle road. A few miles beyond that city the little river Sark
-divides the two countries. Just over the bridge is the toll-house:
-a footpath to the right takes you to Springfield. Till about 1826
-the North road lay through this village; then, however, the way was
-changed, and ran by Gretna Green, which is nine and a half miles
-from Carlisle. These two places, together with the toll-house, are
-all in Gretna parish; but of course the best known is Gretna Green:
-“the resort” (wrote Pennant) “of all amorous couples whose union
-the prudence of parents or guardians prohibits.” The place acquired
-a world-wide fame: that English plays and novels should abound in
-references to it, as they had done to the Fleet, was only natural;
-but one of George Sand’s heroes elopes thither with a banker’s
-daughter, and even Victor Hugo hymns it in melodious verse, albeit his
-pronunciation is a little peculiar:
-
-  La mousse des près exhale
-  Avril, qui chante drin, drin,
-  Et met une succursale
-  De Cythère à Gretna Green.
-
-And how to explain the fact that people hurried from the remotest
-parts of Scotland as well as from England, though any square yard of
-soil “frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat’s” had served their purpose just
-as well? The parishioners, indeed, sought not the service of their
-self-appointed priest; but is there not an ancient saying as to the
-prophet’s lack of honour among his own people?
-
-Now, if you travelled North in proper style, in a chaise and four, with
-post-boys and so forth, you went to the “King’s Head” at Springfield,
-or, after the change of road, more probably to Gretna Hall; but your
-exact halting-place was determined at Carlisle. The postillions there,
-being in league with one or other of the Gretna innkeepers, took you
-willy-nilly to one or the other hostelry. Were you poor and tramped
-it, you were glad to get the knot tied at the toll-house. Most of the
-business fell into a few hands. Indeed, the landlords of the various
-inns instead of performing the rite themselves usually sent for a
-so-called priest. A certificate after this sort was given to the wedded
-couple:--“Kingdom of Scotland, County of Dumfries, Parish of Gretna:
-these are to certify to all whom it may concern that (here followed the
-names) by me, both being present and having declared to me that they
-are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the law
-of Scotland.” This the parties and their witnesses subscribed.
-
-I shall not attempt to trace the obscure succession of Gretna Green
-priests. Joseph Paisley, who died in 1811, aged eighty-four, was, it
-seems, the original blacksmith; but he was no son of Tubal Cain,
-though he had been fisher, smuggler, tobacconist. He united man with
-woman even as the smith welds iron with iron--thus the learned explain
-his title. After Paisley, and connected with him by marriage, there
-was Robert Elliott, and several people of the name of Laing. In some
-rather amusing memoirs Elliott assures us that between 1811 and 1839 he
-performed three thousand eight hundred and seventy-two marriages; also
-that his best year was 1825, when he did one hundred and ninety-eight,
-and his worst 1839, when he did but forty-two. At the toll-bar there
-was a different line, whose most picturesque figure was Gordon, the old
-soldier. Gordon officiated in full regimentals, a large cocked hat on
-his head and a sword by his side. Here, too, Beattie reigned for some
-years before 1843. His occupation went to his head, for latterly he
-had a craze for marrying, so that he would creep up behind any chance
-couple and begin to mumble the magic words that made them one. The law
-has ever terrors for the unlettered, and the rustic bachelor fled at
-Beattie’s approach, as if he had been the pest. The “priests” sometimes
-used a mangled form of the Church of England service: which irreverence
-was probably intended as a delicate compliment to the nationality of
-most of their clients. The fees were uncertain. When the trembling
-parties stood hand in hand in inn or toll-bar, whilst the hoofs of
-pursuing post-horses thundered ever nearer, ever louder, or it might be
-that irate father or guardian battered at the door, it was no time to
-bargain. The “priest” saw his chance; and now and again he pouched as
-much as a hundred pounds.
-
-Each house had its record of famous marriages. There was the story
-of how Lord Westmoreland sought the hand of the heiress of Child,
-the banker, and was repulsed with “Your blood, my Lord, is good, but
-money is better.” My Lord and the young lady were speedily galloping
-towards the border, while Mr. Child “breathed hot and instant on their
-trace.” He had caught them too, but his leader was shot down or his
-carriage disabled by some trick (the legends vary), and he was too late
-after all. He made the best of it, of course, and in due time Lady
-Sophia Fane, daughter of the marriage, inherited grandpa’s fortune
-and his bank at Temple Bar. Odder still was the marriage, in 1826,
-of Edward Gibbon Wakefield to Ellen Turner. It was brought about by
-an extraordinary fraud, and a week after the far from happy couple
-were run to earth at Calais by the bride’s relatives. They “quoted
-William and Mary upon me till I was tired of their Majesties’ names,”
-was Wakefield’s mournful excuse for submitting to a separation. He
-was afterwards tried for abduction, found guilty, and sentenced to
-three years’ imprisonment; while a special Act of Parliament (7 and 8
-Geo. IV. c. 66) declared the marriage null and void. Wakefield ended
-strangely as a political economist. Is not his “theory of colonisation”
-writ large in all the text books? A pair of Lord High Chancellors
-must conclude our list. In November 1772, John Scott, afterwards Lord
-Eldon, was married at Blackshiels, in East Lothian, to Bessie Surtees,
-the bridegroom being but twenty-one. Though the Rev. Mr. Buchanan,
-minister of an Episcopal congregation at Haddington, officiated, it was
-a runaway match and an irregular marriage. Lord Erskine, about October
-1818, was wedded at the “King’s Head,” Springfield, to Miss Mary Buck
-(said to have been his housekeeper). He was about seventy, and, one
-fears, in his dotage. A number of extravagant legends still linger as
-to the ceremony. He was dressed in woman’s clothes, and played strange
-pranks. He and his intended spouse had with them in the coach a brace
-of merry-begots (as our fathers called them), over whom he threw his
-cloak during the ceremony in order to make them his heirs. It is still
-a vulgar belief in the North that if the parents of children born out
-of wedlock are married, the offspring, to be legitimised, must be held
-under their mother’s girdle through the nuptial rites. Now, by the
-law of Scotland, such a marriage produces the effect noted; but the
-presence or absence of the children is void of legal consequence. As
-far as is known, Erskine had one son called Hampden, born December 5,
-1821, and no other by Mary Buck. It is worth noting that Robert Burns,
-on his road to Carlisle in 1787, fell in by the way “with a girl and
-her married sister”; and “the girl, after some overtures of gallantry
-on my side, sees me a little cut with the bottle, and offers to take me
-in for a Gretna Green affair.” Burns was already wed, Scots fashion, to
-Jean Armour. And the thing did not come off, so that bigamy is not to
-be reckoned among the poet’s sins.
-
-They were rather sordid affairs in the end, those Gretna Green
-marriages. So, at least, the Reverend James Roddick, minister of
-the parish, writing of the place in 1834 in the _New Statistical
-Account_, would have us believe. There were three or four hundred
-marriages annually: “the parties are chiefly from the sister kingdom
-and from the lowest rank of the population.” A number came from
-Carlisle at fair-time, got married, spent a few days together, and
-then divorced themselves. Competition had brought down the priest’s
-fee to half-a-crown, and every tippling-house had its own official.
-Nay, the very roadman on the highway that joined the kingdoms pressed
-his services on all and sundry! And then the railway came to Gretna,
-and you had the spectacle of “priests” touting on the platform. Alas
-for those shores of old Romance! In 1856, Lord Brougham’s Act (19 &
-20 Vict. cap. 96), made well-nigh as summary an end of Gretna as Lord
-Hardwicke’s had of the Fleet unions. It provided that at least one
-of the parties to an irregular Scots marriage must be domiciled in
-Scotland, or have resided there during the twenty-one days immediately
-preceding the espousals; else were they altogether void. What an enemy
-your modern law-giver is to the picturesque! And what an entertaining
-place this world must once have been!
-
-
-
-
-The Border Law
-
-    The Border Country--Its Lays and Legends--The Wardens and Other
-    Officers--Johnie Armstrong--Merrie Carlisle--Blackmail--The Border
-    Chieftain and His Home--A Raid--“Hot-trod”--“To-names”--A Bill
-    of Complaint--The Day of Truce--Business and Pleasure--“Double
-    and Salffye”--Border Faith--Deadly Feud--The Story of Kinmont
-    Willie--The Debateable Land--The Union of the Crowns and the End of
-    Border Law.
-
-
-_Leges marchiarum_, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and
-lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and
-Scots Borderers should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should
-guard against the other’s deadly unceasing enmity. I propose to outline
-these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were
-enforced.
-
-But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the
-Solway--the extreme points of the dividing line between North and
-South Britain--is but seventy miles in a crow’s flight. But trace its
-windings, and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half of
-this space the division is arbitrary. It happed where the opposing
-forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here,
-was pushed back a little farther north there; and commissioners and
-treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three
-centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the
-kingdoms met. If it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots’ character, and
-prevented the growth of commerce and tilth and comfort in Scotland
-proper, what must have been its effect on the Scots Borderer, ever in
-the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt
-the struggle far more than England, yet the English were worse troubled
-than the Scots Borders: being the richer, they were the more liable
-to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other
-Englishmen; they were kept in hand by a strong central authority; they
-had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now,
-the Scots clansmen developed unchecked; so it is mainly from them that
-we take our ideas of Border life.
-
-The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded
-hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins
-of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past,
-however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads
-are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can,
-the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of
-other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness, yet
-we oft feel:
-
-  He had himself laid hand on sword
-  He who this rime did write!
-
-The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional
-stories help but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more,
-and tell it better, than the dull records of the annalists. We know who
-these men really were--a strong, resolute race, passionate and proud,
-rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless
-devotion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to
-the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes
-across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasion to a certain
-rude eloquence; and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome.
-The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen;
-and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the
-Highlands to the north and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder
-at the burden _it_ had to endure. For a race, whatever its good
-qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as
-well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots,
-were girded at as “always riding”; and they were not particular as to
-whom they rode against. Nay, both governments suspected the Borderers
-of an inexplicable tenderness for their neighbours. When they took part
-in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspicious
-lack of heart. At best they were apt to look at war from their own
-point of view, and fight for mere prisoners or plunder.
-
-To meet such conditions the Border Laws were evolved. They were
-administered in chief by special officers called Wardens. Either Border
-was portioned out into three Marches: the East, the Middle, and the
-West (the Lordship of Liddesdale was included in the Scots Middle
-March, but sometimes it had a special Keeper of almost equal dignity
-with a Warden.) Each of the three Scots Wardens had a hundred pounds of
-yearly fee; he could appoint deputies, captains of strongholds, clerks,
-sergeants, and dempsters; he could call out the full force of his
-district to invade or beat back invasion; he represented the Sovereign,
-and was responsible for crimes. He must keep the Border clans in order
-by securing as hostages several of their most conspicuous sons, and
-either these were quartered on nobles on the other side of the Firth,
-or they were held in safer keeping in the king’s castles. He also held
-Justice Courts for the trial of Scots subjects accused of offences
-against the laws of their own country. He was commonly a great noble
-of the district, his office in early times being often hereditary;
-and, as such noble, he had power of life and death, so that the need
-for holding special courts was little felt. A pointed Scots anecdote
-pictures an angry Highlander “banning” the Lords of Session as “kinless
-loons,” because, though some were relatives, they had decided a case
-against him. These Wardens were _not_ “kinless loons,” and they often
-used their office to favour a friend or depress a foe. On small pretext
-they put their enemies “to the horn,” as the process of outlawry (by
-trumpet blast) was called. True, the indifference with which those
-enemies “went to the horn” would scandalise the legal pedants.
-
-Sometimes a superior officer, called “Lieutenant,” was sent to the
-Borders; the Wardens were under him; he more fully represented the
-royal power. Now and again the Sovereign himself made a progress,
-administering a rough and ready justice, and so “dantoning the
-thieves of the Borders, and making the rush bush keep the cow.” So
-it was said of James V.’s famous raid in 1529. The chief incident
-was the capture of Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the ruins of whose
-picturesque tower at the Hollows still overlook the Esk. Gilnockie
-came to meet his King with a great band of horsemen richly apparelled.
-He was captain of Langholm Castle, and the ballad tells how he and
-his companions exercised themselves in knightly sports on Langholm
-Lee, whilst “The ladies lukit frae their loft windows. ‘God bring our
-men well hame agen!’” the ladies said; and their apprehensions were
-more than justified, for Johnie’s reception was not so cordial as he
-expected. “What wants yon knave that a King should have?” asked James
-in angry amaze, as he ordered the band to instant execution. Gilnockie
-and company were presently strung up on some convenient yew-trees at
-Carlenrig, though, in accordance with romantic precedent, one is said
-to have escaped to tell the tale. Many of Johnie’s name, among them Ill
-Will Armstrong, tersely described as “another stark thieff,” went to
-their doom; but the act, however applauded at Edinburgh, was bitterly
-condemned on the Borders. Gilnockie only plundered the English, it
-was urged, and the King had caught him by a trick unworthy a Stuart.
-The country folk loved to tell how the dule-trees faded away, and
-they loved to point out the graves of the Armstrongs in the lonely
-churchyard. But the stirring ballad preserves the name better than
-all else. It unblushingly commends Gilnockie’s love of honesty, his
-generosity, his patriotism, and directly accuses his Sovereign of
-treachery, in which accusation there is perhaps some truth. Anyhow,
-his execution was the violent act of a weak man, and had no permanent
-effect.
-
-The Wardens had twofold duties: first, that of defence against the
-enemy; second, that of negotiation in times of peace with their
-mighty opposites. Thus the Border laws were part police and part
-international, and were administered in different courts. Offences of
-the first class were speaking or conferring with Englishmen without
-permission of the King or the Warden, and the warning Englishmen of the
-Scots’ alertness in the matter of forays. In brief, aiding, abetting,
-or in any way holding intercourse with the “auld enemy” was march
-treason (to adopt a convenient English term).
-
-In England the Wardens were finally chosen for their political and
-military skill, not because of their territorial position. Now, the
-Warden of the East Marches was commonly Governor and Castellan of
-Berwick. The castle of Harbottell was allotted to the Warden of the
-Middle Marches; whilst for the West, Carlisle, where again Governor
-and Warden were often one, was the appointed place. Sometimes a Lord
-warden-general was appointed, sometimes a Lieutenant, but the Wardens
-were commonly independent. At the Warden courts Englishmen were
-punished for march treason, a branch of which was furnishing the Scots
-with articles of merchandise or war. And here I note that Carlisle
-throve on this illegal traffic. At Carlisle Fair the Carlisle burgher
-never asked the nationality of man or beast. The first got his money or
-its equivalent; the second was instantly passed through the hands of
-butcher and skinner. Though the countryside were wasted, the burghers
-lay safe within their strong walls, and waxed fat on the spoils of
-borderman and dalesman alike. Small wonder the city was “Merrie
-Carlisle.” The law struck with as little force against blackmail, or
-protection money, which it was an offence to pay to any person, Scots
-or English. From this source, Gilnockie and others, coining the terror
-of their name, drew great revenue. Another provision was against
-marriage with a Scotswoman without the Warden’s consent, for in this
-way traitors, or “half-marrows,” arose within the gate. Complete forms
-are preserved of the procedure at those Warden courts. There were a
-grand jury and an ordinary jury, and the Warden acted very much as a
-judge of to-day. One or two technical terms I shall presently explain.
-Here I but note that the criminal guilty of march treason was beheaded
-“according to the customs of the marches.”
-
-The international duties of the Wardens were those of conference with
-each other, and the redressing of approved wrongs, which wrongs were
-usually done in raids or forays. Of these I must now give some account.
-The smaller Border chieftain dwelt in a peel tower, stuck on the edge
-of a rock or at the break of a torrent. It was a rude structure with
-a projecting battlement. A stair or ladder even held its two stories
-together, and about it lay a barnkin--a space of some sixty feet
-encompassed by a wall; the laird’s followers dwelling in huts hard
-by. For small parties the tower was self-sufficient in defence, and
-if it lay in the way of a hostile army, the laird was duly warned
-by scouts or beacon fires, and withdrew to some fastness of rock or
-marsh, carrying his few valuables, driving his live stock before him,
-leaving the foeman nothing to burn and nothing to take away. With his
-followers he lived on milk, meat, and barley, together with the spoils
-of the forest and stream. The marchmen are reported temperate--no
-doubt from necessity. Their kine, recruited by forays, were herded in
-a secluded part of the glen, and when the herd waxed small, and the
-laird was tired of hunting, and his women lusted after new ornament,
-and old wounds were healed, and the retainers were growing rusty, then
-it was time for a raid. Was the laird still inactive? In struck his
-lady’s sharper wit, and the story goes that Wat Scott of Harden was
-ever and anon served with a dish which, being uncovered, revealed a
-pair of _polished_ spurs. Thus his wife, Mary Scott, the “Flower of
-Yarrow”--a very practical person, despite her romantic name--urged him
-to profitable rapine. Well: his riders were bidden to a trysting-place;
-and hither, armed in jacks (which are leathern jerkins plated with
-iron) and mounted on small but active and hardy horses, they repaired
-at evenfall. The laird and some superior henchmen wore also sleeves
-of mail and steel bonnets; all had long lances, swords, axes, and in
-later times such rude firearms--serpentines, half-haggs, harquebusses,
-currys, cullivers, and hand-guns are mentioned--as were to be had.
-In the mirk night the reivers crossed the Border; and to do this
-unseen was no easy matter. The whole line from Berwick to Carlisle was
-patrolled by setters and searchers, watchers and overseers, having
-sleuth-hounds to track the invader; also, many folk held lands by the
-tenure of cornage, and by blowing horns must warn the land of coming
-raids. Where the frontier line was a river the fords were carefully
-guarded; those held unnecessary were staked up; narrow passes were
-blocked in divers ways, so that chief element in Border craft was the
-knowledge of paths and passes through moorland and moss, and of nooks
-and coigns of security deep in the mountain glens.
-
-Our party crosses in safety and makes to one of those hidden spots,
-as near as may be to the scene of action. Here it rests and refreshes
-itself during the day, and next night it swoops down on its appointed
-foray. The chief quest was ever cattle, which were eatable and
-portable. But your moss-trooper was not particular. He took everything
-inside and outside house and byre. Many lists are preserved of
-things lifted, whereof one notes a shroud and children’s clothes. A
-sleuth-hound was a choice prize. Possibly its abduction touched the
-Borderer’s sense of humour. Scott of Harden, escaping from a raid, with
-“a bow of kye and a bassen’d (brindled) bull,” passed a trim haystack.
-He sighed as he thought of the lack of fodder in his own glen. “Had
-ye but four feet ye should not stand lang there,” he muttered as he
-hurried onwards. Not to him, not to any rider was it given to tarry by
-the way, for the dalesmen were not the folk to sit down under outrage.
-The warder, as he looked from the “Scots gate” of Carlisle castle, and
-saw the red flame leaping forth into the night from burning homestead
-or hamlet, was quick to warn the countryside that a reiving expedition
-was afoot. Even though the prey were lifted unobserved, that only
-caused a few hours’ delay, and soon a considerable body, carrying
-a lighted piece of turf on a spear, as a sign, was instant on the
-invader’s trace. This “following of the fraye” was called “hot-trod,”
-and was done with hound and horn, and hue and cry. Certain privileges
-attached to the “hot-trod.” If the offender was caught red-handed he
-was executed; or, if thrift got the better of rage, he was held to
-ransom. As early as 1276 a curious case is reported from Alnwick, of a
-Scot attacking one Semanus, a hermit, and taking his clothes and one
-penny! Being presently seized, the culprit was beheaded by Semanus in
-person, who thus recovered his goods and took vengeance of his wrong. A
-later legend illustrates the more than summary justice that was done.
-The Warden’s officers having taken a body of prisoners, asked my Lord
-his pleasure. His Lordship’s mind was “ta’en up wi’ affairs o’ the
-state,” and he hastily wished the whole set hanged for their untimely
-intrusion. Presently he was horrified to find that his imprecations
-had been taken as literal commands, and literally obeyed. Even if
-the reivers gained their own border, the law of “hot-trod” permitted
-pursuit within six days of the offence. The pursuer, however, must
-summon some reputable man of the district entered to witness his
-proceedings. Nay, the inhabitants generally must assist him--at least,
-the law said so.
-
-But if all failed, the _Leges Marchiarum_ had still elaborate
-provisions to meet his case. He had a shrewd guess who were his
-assailants. The more noted moss-troopers were “kenspeckle folk.”
-The very fact that so many had the same surname caused them to be
-distinguished by what were called “to-names,” based on some physical
-or moral characteristic, which even to-day photographs the man for us.
-Such were Eddie Great-legs, Jock Half-lugs, Red-neb Hob, Little Jock
-Elliott, Wynkyng Wyll, Wry-crag, Ill Wild Will, Evil Willie, David
-the Leddy, Hob the King; or some event in a man’s history provided
-a “to-name.” Ill Drooned Geordy, you fancy, had barely escaped a
-righteous doom, and Archie Fire-the-Braes was sure a swashbuckler of
-the first magnitude. Others derived from their father’s name.
-
-  The Lairdis Jok
-  All with him takis.
-
-Thus, Sir Thomas Maitland, who has preserved some of these appellations
-in his _Complainte Aganis the Thievis of Liddisdail_, apparently the
-only weapon he--though Scots Chancellor--could use against them.
-Other names, the chroniclers affirm, are more expressive still; but
-modern prudery forbids their recovery. They were good enough headmark,
-whatever their quality; and a harried household had but to hear one
-shouted in or after the harrying to know who the harriers were. The
-slogan, or war-cry, of the clan would rap out in the excitement, and
-there again he knew his men. The cross of St. Andrew showed them to be
-Scots, the cross of St. George affirmed them English. A letter sewn
-in a cap, a kerchief round the arm, were patent identification. The
-chieftain’s banner was borne now and again, even in a daylight foray--a
-mode affected by the more daring spirits.
-
-Divining in some sort his spoiler, the aggrieved and plundered
-sought legal redress. Now the Laws of the Marches, agreed on by royal
-commissioners from the two kingdoms, regulated intercourse from early
-times. Thus as early as 1249, eleven knights of Northumberland, and
-as many from the Scots Border, drew up a rough code: for the recovery
-of debts, the surrender of fugitive bondsmen, and the trial by combat
-of weightier matters in dispute. All Scotsmen, save the king and the
-bishops of St. Andrews and Dunkeld, accused of having committed a
-crime in England, must fight their accuser at certain fixed places on
-the Marches; and there were corresponding provisions when the accused
-was an Englishman. What seems a form of the _judicium Dei_ appears in
-another provision. An animal said to be stolen, being brought to the
-Tweed or the Esk, where either formed the boundary, was driven into
-the water. If the beast sank the defendant paid. If it swam to the
-farther shore, the claimant had him as his own. If it scrambled back
-to the bank whence it started, the accused might (perchance) retain
-it with a clear conscience. But as to this event the record is silent;
-and, indeed, the whole business lacks intelligibility. The combats,
-however, were many, and were much denounced by the clergy, who had to
-provide a champion, and were heavily mulcted if he lost. The priest
-suffered no more than the people; but he could better voice his wrongs.
-All such things were obviously adaptations of the trial by ordeal, or
-by combat, and the treason duel of chivalry, to the rough life of the
-Border. Again, the matter was settled, even in late times, by the oath
-of the accused. The prisoner was sworn:--“By Heaven above you, Hell
-beneath you, by your part of Paradise, by all that God made in six
-days and seven nights, and by God Himself,” that he was innocent. In a
-superstitious age this might have some effect; and there was ever the
-fear of being branded as perjured. But it can have been used only when
-there was no proof, or when the doubt was very grave: when the issue,
-that is, seemed as the cutting of a knot, the loosing whereof passed
-man’s wit.
-
-In the century preceding the Union of the Crowns, the international
-code was very highly developed, and the procedure was strictly defined.
-As England was the larger nation, and as its law was in a more highly
-developed and more firm and settled state, its methods were followed
-on the whole. The injured party sent a bill of complaint to his own
-Warden; and the bill, even as put into official form, was simplicity
-itself. It said that A. complained upon B. for that--and then followed
-a list of the stolen goods, or the wrongs done. It was verified by
-the complainant’s oath, and thereafter sent to the opposite Warden,
-whose duty was to arrest the accused or at least to give him notice to
-attend on the next Day of Truce. [One famous fray (June 17, 1575) is
-commemorated in _The Raid of the Reidswire_, a ballad setting forth
-many features of a Day of Truce.] The Wardens agreed on the Day, and
-the place was usually in the northern kingdom, where most of the
-defendants lived. The meeting was proclaimed in all the market towns
-on either side. The parties, each accompanied by troops of friends,
-came in; and a messenger from the English side demanded that assurance
-should be kept till sunrise the following day. This was granted by the
-Scots, who proceeded to send a similar message, and were presently
-secured by a similar assurance. Then each Warden held up his hand as a
-sign of faith, and made proclamation of the Day to his own side (the
-evident purpose of this elaborate ritual was to keep North and South
-from flying, on sight, at each other’s throats). The English Warden
-now came to his Scots brother, whom he saluted and embraced; and the
-business of the Day of Truce (or Diet, or Day Marche, or Warden Court,
-as it was variously called) began. That business was commerce, and
-pleasure, as well as law. Merchants come with their wares; booths
-were run up; a brisk trade ran in articles tempting to the savage
-eye. Both sides were ready for the moment to forget their enmities.
-If they could not fight, they could play, and football was ever your
-Borderers’ favourite pastime (from the desperate mauls which mark that
-exhilarating sport as practised along the Border line, one fancies
-that the “auld riding bluid” still stirs in the veins of the players).
-Gambling, too, was a popular excitement. There was much of feasting
-and drinking, and sure some Border Homer, poor and old and blind, even
-as him of Chios, was there to charm and melt his rude hearers with the
-storied loves and wars of other days. The conclave fairly hummed with
-pleasure and excitement. Yet with such inflammable material, do you
-wonder that the meeting ended now and again in most admired disorder?
-
-For our bill of complaint, it might be tried in more than one way.
-It might be by “the honour of the Warden,” who often had knowledge,
-personal or acquired, of the case, and felt competent to decide the
-matter off-hand. On his first appearance he had taken an oath (yearly
-renewed) in presence of the opposite Warden and the whole assemblage
-to do justice, and he now officially “fyled” or “cleared the bill”
-(as the technical phrase ran) by writing on it the words “foull (or
-‘clear’), as I am verily persuaded upon my conscience and honour”--a
-deliverance after the method wherein individual peers give their
-voice at a trial of one of their order. This did not of necessity end
-the matter, for the complainant could present a new bill and get the
-verdict of a jury thereon, which also was the proper tribunal where the
-Warden declined to interfere. It was thus chosen: The English Warden
-named and swore in six Scots, the Scots Warden did the like to six
-Englishmen. The oath ran in these terms:--“Yea shall cleare noe bill
-worthie to be fild, yea shall file no bill worthie to be cleared,” and
-so forth. Warden sergeants were appointed who led the jury to a retired
-place; the bills were presented; and the jurymen fell to work. It would
-seem that they did so in two sections, each considering complaints
-against its own nationality. If the bill was “fyled,” the word “foull”
-was written upon it (of course, a verdict of guilty); but how to
-get such a verdict under such conditions? The assize had more than a
-fellow-feeling for the culprit: like the jury in Aytoun’s story, they
-might think that Flodden (then no distant memory) was not yet avenged.
-There were divers expedients to this end. Commissioners were sometimes
-appointed by the two crowns to solve a difficulty a Warden Court had
-failed to adjust. Again, it was strangely provided that “If the accused
-be not quitt by the oathe of the assize it is a conviction.” One very
-stubborn jury (_temp._ 1596) sat for a day, a night, and a day on end,
-“almost to its undoeinge.” The Warden, enraged at such conduct and yet
-fearing for the men’s lives, needs must discharge them. I ought to
-mention an alleged third mode of trial by vower, who, says Sir Walter
-Scott, was an umpire to whom the dispute was referred. Rather was he a
-witness of the accused’s own nation. Some held such evidence essential
-to conviction; if honest, it was practically conclusive.
-
-Well! Suppose the case too clear and the man too friendless, and the
-jury “fyled” the bill. If the offence were capital, the prisoner was
-kept in safe custody, and was hanged or beheaded as soon as possible.
-But most affairs were not capital. Thus the Border Law forbad hunting
-in the other kingdom without the express leave of the owner of the
-soil. Just such an unlicensed hunting is the theme of _Chevy Chase_.
-Thus:--
-
-  The Percy owt of Northumberland,
-    And a vow to God mayd he,
-  That he wolde hunte in the mountayns
-    Off Cheviot within dayes thre,
-  In the mauger of doughty Douglas,
-    And all that ever with him be.
-
-Douglas took a summary mode of redress where a later and tamer owner
-had lodged his bill. In a common case of theft, if the offender were
-not present (the jury would seem to have tried cases in absence), the
-Warden must produce him at the next Day of Truce. Indeed, whilst the
-jury was deliberating, the officials were going over the bills “filed”
-on the last Day, and handing over each culprit to the opposite Warden;
-or sureties were given for him; or the Warden delivered his servant as
-pledge. If the pledge died, the body was carried to the next Warden
-Court.
-
-The guilty party, being delivered up, must make restitution within
-forty days or suffer death, whilst aggravated cases of “lifting”
-were declared capital. In practice a man taken in fight or otherwise
-was rarely put to death. Captive and captor amicably discussed the
-question of ransom. That fixed, the captive was allowed to raise it;
-if he failed he honourably surrendered. The amount of restitution
-was the “Double and Salffye,” to wit, three times the value of the
-original goods, two parts being recompense, and the third costs or
-expenses. Need I say that this triple return was too much for Border
-honesty? Sham claims were made, and these, for that they obliged the
-Wardens “to speire and search for the thing that never was done,” were
-rightly deemed a great nuisance. As the bills were sworn to, each
-false charge involved perjury; and in 1553 it was provided that the
-rascal claimants should be delivered over to the tender mercies of the
-opposite Warden. Moreover, a genuine bill might be grossly exaggerated
-(are claims against insurance and railway companies always urged with
-accuracy of detail?). If it were disputed, the value was determined by
-a mixed jury of Borderers.
-
-I have had occasion to refer to Border faith. In 1569 the Earl of
-Northumberland was implicated in a rising against Elizabeth. Fleeing
-north, he took refuge with an Armstrong, Hector of Harelaw, who
-sold him to the Regent Murray. Harelaw’s name became a byword and a
-reproach. He died despised and neglected; and “to take Hector’s cloak”
-was an imputation of treachery years after the original story had
-faded. Thus, in Marchland the deadliest insult against a man was to
-say that he had broken faith. The insult was given in a very formal
-and deliberate manner, called a Baugle. The aggrieved party procured
-the glove or picture of the traitor, and whenever there was a meeting
-(a Day of Trace was too favourable an opportunity to be neglected) he
-gave notice of the breach of faith to friend and foe, with blast of
-the horn and loud cries. The man insulted must give him the lie in his
-throat, and a deadly combat ensued. The Laws of the Marches attempted
-to substitute the remedy by bill, that the matter might not “goe to the
-extremyte of a baughle,” or where that was impossible, to fix rules for
-the thing itself. Or, the Wardens were advised to attend, with less
-than a hundred of retinue, to prevent “Brawling, buklinge, quarrelinge,
-and bloodshed.” Such things were a fruitful source of what a Scots
-Act termed “the heathenish and barbarous custom of Deadly Feud.” When
-one slew his fellow under unfair conditions, the game of revenge
-went see-sawing on for generations. The Border legislators had many
-ingenious devices to quench such strife. A Warden might order a man
-complained of to sign in solemn form a renunciation of his feud; and if
-he refused, he was delivered to the opposite Warden till he consented.
-In pre-Reformation days the church did something by enjoining prayer
-and pilgrimage. A sum of money (Assythement) now and again settled
-old scores; or there might be a treaty of peace cemented by marriage.
-Sometimes, again, there was a fight by permission of the Sovereign.
-(_Cf._ the parallel case of the clan-duel in the _Fair Maid of Perth_.)
-Still, prearranged single combats, duels in fact, were frequent on the
-Border. Turner, or Turnie Holme, at the junction of the Kirshope and
-Liddel, was a favourite spot for them.
-
-And now business and pleasure alike are ended, and the day (fraught
-with anxiety to official minds) is waning fast. Proclamation is made
-that the multitude may know the matters transacted. Then it is declared
-that the Lord Wardens of England and Scotland, and Scotland and England
-(what tender care for each other’s susceptibilities!) appoint the
-next Day of Truce, which ought not to be more than forty days hence,
-at such and such a place. Then, with solemn salutations and ponderous
-interchange of courtesy, each party turns homeward. As noted, the Truce
-lasted till the next sunrise. As the nations were at peace (else had
-there been no meeting), this recognised the fact that the Borders
-were always, more or less, in a state of trouble. Also it prevented
-people from violently righting themselves forthwith. A curious case in
-1596, where this condition was broken, gave rise to a Border foray of
-the most exciting kind, commemorated in the famous ballad of _Kinmont
-Willie_. A Day of Truce had been held on the Kershope Burn, and at its
-conclusion Willie Armstrong of Kinmont, a noted Scots freebooter, rode
-slowly off, with a few companions. Some taunt, or maybe the mere sight
-of one who had done them so much wrong, was too much for the English
-party, and Kinmont was speedily laid by the heels in Carlisle Castle.
-Buccleuch was Keeper of Liddisdale. He had not been present at the Day
-of Truce; but when they told him that Kinmont had been seized “between
-the hours of night and day,” he expressed his anger in no uncertain
-terms:
-
-  He has ta’en the table wi’ his hand,
-  He garr’d the red wine spring on hie.
-
-       *       *       *       *
-
-  And have they ta’en him, Kinmont Willie,
-  Against the truce of Border tide?
-  And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
-  Is keeper here on the Scottish side?
-
-Negociations failing to procure redress, Buccleuch determined to rescue
-Kinmont himself. In the darkness of a stormy night he and his men stole
-up to Carlisle, broke the citadel, rescued Kinmont, and carried him off
-in safety, whilst the English lawyers were raising ingenious technical
-justifications (you can read them at length in the collection of Border
-Papers) of the capture. Those same papers show that the ballad gives
-the main features of the rescue with surprising accuracy. But I cannot
-linger over its cheerful numbers. The event might once have provoked
-a war, but the shadow of the Union was already cast. James would do
-nothing to spoil the splendid prize almost within his grasp, and
-Elizabeth’s statesmen were not like to quarrel with their future master.
-
-Half a century before the consummation one great cause of discord had
-been removed. From the junction of the Liddel and Esk to the Solway
-was known as the Debateable Land, a sort of No-Man’s Land, left in
-doubt from the time of Bruce. Both nations pastured on it from sunrise
-to sunset, but in the night any beasts left grazing were lawful prey
-to the first comer. Enclosures or houses on it could be destroyed or
-burned without remedy. Apparently the idea was to make it a “buffer
-State” between the two kingdoms. It was, however, a thorn in the flesh
-to each, for the Bateables, as the in-dwellers were called, were
-broken men, and withal the most desperate ruffians on the Border. In
-1552 a joint Commission divided the Debateable Land between England
-and Scotland. The Bateables were driven out, and a dyke was built as
-boundary line. All the same, here was, for many years, the wildest in
-the whole wild whirlpool; so that long after the Union, when somebody
-told King James of a cow which, taken from England to Scotland, had
-broken loose and got home of itself, the British Solomon was sceptical.
-It gravelled him, he confessed, to imagine any four-footed thing
-passing unlifted through the Debateable Land.
-
-With the death of Elizabeth (1603) came the Union of the Crowns, and
-the Scots riders felt their craft in danger, for they forthwith made
-a desperate incursion into England, with some idea (it is thought) of
-staying the event. But they were severely punished, and needs must
-cower under the now all-powerful Crown. The appointment of effective
-Wardens presently ceased. In 1606, by the Act 4 Jac. I., cap. 1, the
-English Parliament repealed the anti-Scots laws, on condition that the
-Scots Parliament reciprocated; and presently a kindred measure was
-touched with the sceptre at Edinburgh. The administration of the Border
-was left to the ordinary tribunals, and the _Leges Marchiarum_ vanished
-to the Lumber Room.
-
-
-
-
-The Serjeant-at-Law
-
-    The Black Patch on the Wig--A King’s Serjeant--The Old English
-    Law Courts--The Common Pleas--Queen’s Counsel--How Serjeants
-    were Created--Their Feasts--Their Posies--Their Colts--Chaucer’s
-    Serjeant-at-Law--The Coif--The Fall of the Order--Some Famous
-    Serjeants.
-
-
-You have no doubt, at some time or other, walked through the Royal
-Courts of Justice and admired the Judges in their scarlet or other
-bravery. One odd little detail may have caught your eye: a black patch
-on the top differences the wig of the present (1898) Master of the
-Rolls from those of his brethren. It signifies that the wearer is a
-Serjeant-at-Law, and when he goes to return no more, with him will
-probably vanish the Order of the Coif. Verily, it will be the “end
-o’ an auld sang,” of a record stretching back to the beginning of
-English jurisprudence, of an order whose passing had, at one time,
-seemed as the passing of the law itself. Here in bare outline I set
-forth its ancient and famous history. And, first, as to the name.
-Under the feudal system land was held from the Crown upon various
-tenures. Sometimes special services were required from the holders;
-these were called Serjeants, and a tenure was said to be by Serjeanty.
-Special services, though usually military, now and again had to do
-with the administration of justice. A man enjoyed his plot because he
-was coroner, keeper of the peace, summoner, or what not; and, over
-and above the land, he had the fees of the office. A few offices,
-chiefly legal, came to have no land attached--were only paid in fees.
-Such a business was a Serjeanty in gross, or at large, as one might
-say. Again, after the Conquest, whilst the records of our law courts
-were in Latin, the spoken language was Norman-French--a fearful and
-wondrous tongue that grew to be--“as ill an hearing in the mouth as
-law-French,” says Milton scornfully--and indeed Babel had scarce
-matched it. But from the first it must have been a sore vexation to
-the thick-witted Saxon haled before the tribunal of his conquerors.
-He needs must employ a _counter_, or man skilled in the _conter_, as
-the pleadings were called. The business was a lucrative one, so the
-Crown assumed the right of regulation and appointment. It was held for
-a Serjeanty in gross, and its holders were _servientes regis ad legem_.
-The word _regis_ was soon omitted except as regards those specially
-retained for the royal service. The literal translation of the other
-words is Serjeants-at-law, still the designation of the surviving
-fellows of the order. The Serjeant-at-law was appointed, or, in form at
-least, commanded to take office by writ under the Great Seal. He was
-courteously addressed as “you,” whilst the sheriff was commonly plain
-“thou” or “thee.” The King’s or Queen’s Serjeants were appointed by
-letters patent; and though this official is extinct as the dodo, he is
-mentioned after the Queen’s Attorney-General as the public prosecutor
-in the proclamation still mumbled at the opening of courts like the Old
-Bailey.
-
-Now, in the early Norman period the _aula regis_, or Supreme Court,
-was simply the King acting as judge with the assistance of his great
-officers of state. In time there developed therefrom among much else
-the three old common law courts; whereof the Common Pleas settled the
-disputes of subjects, the King’s Bench, suits concerning the King
-and the realm, the Exchequer, revenue matters. Though the last two
-by means of quaint fictions afterwards acquired a share of private
-litigation, yet such was more properly for the Court of Common Pleas.
-It was peculiarly the Serjeants’ court, and for many centuries, up to
-fifty years ago, they had the exclusive right of audience. Until the
-Judicature Acts they were the body of men next to the judges, each
-being addressed from the bench as “Brother,” and from them the judges
-must be chosen, also until 1850 the assizes must be held before a judge
-or a Serjeant of the coif.
-
-A clause in Magna Charta provided that the Common Pleas should not
-follow the King’s wanderings, but sit in a fixed place; this fixed
-place came to be near the great door of the Hall at Westminster. With
-the wind in the north the spot was cold and draughty, so after the
-Restoration some daring innovator proposed “to let it (the Court) in
-through the wall into a back room which they called the treasury.” Sir
-Orlando Bridgeman, the Chief Justice, would on no account hear of this.
-To move it an inch were flagrant violation of Magna Charta. Might not,
-he darkly hinted, all its writs be thus rendered null and void? Was
-legal pedantry ever carried further? In a later age the change was made
-without comment, and in our own time the Common Pleas itself has gone
-to the Lumber Room. No doubt this early localising of the court helped
-to develop a special Bar. Other species of practitioners--barristers,
-attorneys, solicitors--in time arose, and the appointment of Queen’s
-Counsel, of whom Lord Bacon was the earliest, struck the first real
-blow at the Order of the Coif; but the detail of such things is not
-for this page. In later days every Serjeant was a more fully developed
-barrister, and then and now, as is well known, every barrister must
-belong to one of the four Inns of Court--the two Temples, Gray’s Inn,
-and Lincoln’s Inn to wit, whose history cannot be told here; suffice
-it to say they were voluntary associations of lawyers, which gradually
-acquired the right of calling to the Bar those who wished to practise.
-
-Now, the method of appointment of Serjeants was as follows: The judges,
-headed by the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, picked out certain
-eminent barristers as worthy of the dignity, their names were given in
-to the Lord Chancellor, and in due time each had his writ, whereof he
-formally gave his Inn notice. His House entertained him at a public
-breakfast, presented him with a gold or silver net purse with ten
-guineas or so as a retaining fee, the chapel bell was tolled, and he
-was solemnly rung out of the bounds. On the day of his call he was
-harangued (often at preposterous length) by the Chief Justice of the
-King’s Bench, he knelt down, and the white coif of the order was fitted
-on his head; he went in procession to Westminster and “counted” in
-a real action in the Court of Common Pleas. For centuries he did so
-in law-French. Lord Hardwicke was the first Serjeant who “counted” in
-English. The new-comer was admitted a member of Serjeants’ Inn, in
-Chancery Lane, in ancient times called Farringdon Inn, whereof all
-the members were Serjeants. Here they dined together on the first
-and last days of term; their clerks also dined in hall, though at a
-separate table--a survival, no doubt, from the days when the retainer
-feasted, albeit “below the salt,” with his master. Dinner done and
-the napery removed, the board of green cloth was constituted, and
-under the presidency of the Chief Judge the business of the House was
-transacted. There was a second Serjeants’ Inn in Fleet Street, but in
-1758 its members joined the older institution in Chancery Lane. When
-the Judicature Acts practically abolished the order, the Inn was sold
-and its property divided among the members, a scandalous proceeding and
-poor result of “the wisdom of an heep of lernede men”!
-
-The Serjeant’s feast on his appointment was a magnificent affair,
-_instar coronationis_, as Fortescue has it. In old times it lasted
-seven days; one of the largest palaces in the metropolis was selected,
-and kings and queens graced its quaint ceremonial. Stow chronicles one
-such celebration at the call of eleven Serjeants, in 1531. There were
-consumed “twenty-four great beefes, one hundred fat muttons, fifty-one
-great veales, thirty-four porkes,” not to mention the swans, the
-larkes, the “capons of Kent,” the “carcase of an ox from the shambles,”
-and so forth. One fancies these solids were washed down by potations
-proportionately long and deep. And there were other attractions and
-other expenses. At the feast in October 1552, “a standing dish of wax
-representing the Court of Common Pleas” was the admiration of the
-guests; again, a year or two later, it is noted that each Serjeant was
-attended by three gentlemen selected by him from among the members of
-his own Inn to act as his sewer, his carver, and his cup-bearer. These
-Gargantuan banquets must have proved a sore burden: they were cut down
-to one day, and, on the union of the Inns in 1758, given up as unsuited
-to the newer times.
-
-One expense remained. Serjeants on their call must give gold rings to
-the Sovereign, the Lord Chancellor, the judges, and many others. From
-about the time of Elizabeth mottoes or “posies” were engraved thereon.
-Sometimes each Serjeant had his own device, more commonly the whole
-call adopted the same motto, which was usually a compliment to the
-reigning monarch or an allusion to some public event. Thus, after the
-Restoration the words ran: _Adeste Corolus Magnus_. With a good deal
-of elision and twisting the Roman numerals for 1660 were extracted
-from this, to the huge delight of the learned triflers. _Imperium et
-libertas_ was the word for 1700, and _plus quam speravimus_ that of
-1714, which was as neat as any. The rings were presented to the judges
-by the Serjeant’s “colt,” as the barrister attendant on him through
-the ceremony was called (probably from _colt_, an apprentice); he also
-had a ring. In the ninth of Geo. II. the fourteen new Serjeants gave,
-as of duty, 1409 rings, valued at £773. That call cost each Serjeant
-nearly £200. This ring-giving continued to the end; another custom,
-that of giving liveries to relatives and friends, was discontinued in
-1759. In mediæval times the new Serjeants went in procession to St.
-Paul’s, and worshipped at the shrine of Thomas à Becket; then to each
-was allotted a pillar, so that his clients might know where to find
-him. The Reformation put a summary end to the worship of St. Thomas,
-but the formality of the pillar lingered on till Old St. Paul’s and Old
-London blazed in the Great Fire of 1666.
-
-The mediæval lawyer lives for us to-day in Chaucer’s famous picture:
-
-  A Sergeant of Lawe, war and wys,
-  That often hadde ben atte parvys,
-  Ther was also, ful riche of excellence.
-  Discret he was, and of great reverence:
-  He semede such, his wordes weren so wise,
-  Justice he was ful often in assise,
-  By patente, and by pleyn commissioun;
-  For his science, and for his heih renoun,
-  Of fees and robes hadde he many oon.
-  So gret a purchasour was nowher noon.
-  Al was fee symple to him in effecte,
-  His purchasyng mighte nought ben enfecte.
-  Nowher so besy a man as he ther nas,
-  And yit he seemede besier than he was.
-  In termes hadde he caas and domes alle;
-  That fro the tyme of kyng William were falle.
-  Therto he couthe endite, and make a thing,
-  Ther couthe no wight pynche at his writyng;
-  And every statute couthe he pleyn by roote.
-  He rood but hoomly in a medlé coote,
-  Gird with a seynt of silk, with barres smale
-  Of his array telle I no lenger tale.
-
-How lifelike that touch of the fussy man, who “seemede besier than he
-was”! But each line might serve as text for a long dissertation! The
-old court hours were early: the judges sat from eight till eleven,
-when your busy Serjeant would, after bolting his dinner, hie him to
-his pillar where he would hear his client’s story, “and take notes
-thereof upon his knee.” The parvys or pervyse of Paul’s--properly, only
-the church door--had come to mean the nave of the cathedral, called
-also “Paul’s Walk,” or “Duke Humphrey’s Walk,” from the supposed tomb
-of Duke Humphrey that stood there. In Tudor times it was the great
-lounge and common newsroom of London. Here the needy adventurer “dined
-with Duke Humphrey,” as the quaint euphemism ran; here spies garnered
-in popular opinion for the authorities. It was the very place for the
-lawyer to meet his client, yet had he other resorts: the round of the
-Temple Church and Westminster are noted as in use for consultations.
-
-Chaucer’s Serjeant “rood but hoomly” because he was travelling; in
-court he had a long priest-like robe, with a furred cape about his
-shoulders and a scarlet hood. The gowns were various, and sometimes
-parti-coloured. Thus, in 1555 we find each new Serjeant possessed
-of one robe of scarlet, one of violet, one of brown and blue, one
-of mustard and murrey, with tabards (short sleeveless coats) of
-cloths of the same colours. The cape was edged, first with lambskin,
-afterwards with more precious stuff. In Langland’s _Vision of Piers
-Plowman_ (1362) there is mention of this dress of the Serjeants, they
-are jibed at for their love of fees and so forth, after a fashion
-that is not yet extinct! But _the_ distinctive feature in the dress
-was the coif, a close-fitting head covering made of white lawn or
-silk. A badge of honour, it was worn on all professional occasions,
-nor was it doffed even in the King’s presence. In monumental effigies
-it is ever prominent. When a Serjeant resigned his dignity he was
-formally discharged from the obligation of wearing it. To discuss its
-exact origin were fruitless, yet one ingenious if mistaken conjecture
-may be noticed. Our first lawyers were churchmen, but in 1217 these
-were finally debarred from general practice in the courts. Many were
-unwilling to abandon so lucrative a calling, but what about the
-tonsure? “They were for decency and comeliness allowed to cover their
-bald pates with a coif, which had been ever since retained.” Thus
-the learned Serjeant Wynne in his tract on the antiquity and dignity
-of the order (1765). In Tudor times, if not before, fashion required
-the Serjeant to wear a small skull-cap of black silk or velvet on the
-top of the coif. This is very clearly shown in one of Lord Coke’s
-portraits. Under Charles II. lawyers, like other folk, began to wear
-wigs, the more exalted they were the bigger their perukes. It was
-wittily said that Bench and Bar went into mourning on Queen Anne’s
-death, and so remained, since their present dress is that then adopted.
-Serjeants were unwilling to lose sight of their coifs altogether,
-and it was suggested on the wig by a round patch of black and white,
-representing the white coif and the cap which had covered it. The limp
-cap of black cloth known as the “black cap” which the judge assumes
-when about to pass sentence of death was, it seems, put on to veil the
-coif, and as a sign of sorrow. It was also carried in the hand when
-attending divine service, and was possibly assumed in pre-Reformation
-times when prayers were said for the dead.
-
-A few words will tell of the fall of the order. As far back as 1755
-Sir John Willis, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, proposed to throw
-open that court as well as the office of judge to barristers who were
-not Serjeants, but the suggestion came to nothing. In 1834, the Bill
-for the establishment of a Central Criminal Court contained a clause
-to open the Common Pleas; this was dropped, but the same object was
-attained by a royal warrant, April 25, 1834. The legality of this was
-soon questioned and, after solemn argument before the Privy Council,
-it was declared invalid. In 1846 a statute (the 9 & 10 Vict. c. 54)
-to the same effect settled the matter, and the Judicature Act of 1873
-provided that no judge need in future be a Serjeant. On the dissolution
-of Serjeants’ Inn its members were received back into the Houses whence
-they had come.
-
-As for centuries all the judges were Serjeants, the history of the
-order is that of the Bench and Bar of England; yet some famous men
-rose no higher, or for one reason or other became representative
-members. Such a one was Sir John Maynard (1602-1690). In his last
-years William III. commented on his venerable appearance: “He must
-have outlived all the lawyers of his time.” “If your Highness had not
-come I should have outlived the law itself,” was the old man’s happy
-compliment. Pleading in Chancery one day, he remarked that he had
-been counsel in the same case half a century before, he had steered a
-middle course in those troubled times, but he had ever leant to the
-side of freedom against King and Protector alike. His share in the
-impeachment of Strafford procured him a jibe in Butler’s _Hudibras_,
-yet it was said that all parties seemed willing to employ him, and
-that he seemed willing to be employed by all. Jeffreys, who usually
-deferred to him, once blustered out, “You are so old as to forget
-your law, Brother Maynard.” “True, Sir George, I have forgotton more
-law than ever you knew,” was the crushing retort. Macaulay has justly
-praised his conduct at the Revolution for that he urged his party
-to disregard legal technicalities and adopt new methods for new and
-unheard-of circumstances. Edmund Plowden (1518-1585) deserves at least
-equally high praise. He was so determined a student that “for three
-years he went not once out of the Temple.” He is said to have refused
-the Chancellorship offered him by Elizabeth as he would not desert
-the old faith. He was attacked again and again for nonconformity,
-but his profound knowledge of legal technicalities enabled him on
-each occasion to escape the net spread for him. He was an Englishman
-loyal to the core, and Catholic as he was opposed in 1555 the violent
-proceedings of Queen Mary’s Parliament. The Attorney-General filed a
-bill against him for contempt, but “Mr. Plowden traversed fully, and
-the matter was never decided.” “A traverse full of pregnancy,” is Lord
-Coke’s enthusiastic comment. On his death in 1584 they buried him in
-that Temple Church whose soil must have seemed twice sacred to this
-oracle of the law. An alabaster monument whereon his effigy reposes
-remains to this day. A less distinguished contemporary was William
-Bendloes (1516-1584), “Old Bendloes,” men called him. A quaint legend
-reports him the only Serjeant at the Common Pleas bar in the first
-year of Elizabeth’s reign. Whether there was no business, or merely
-half-guinea motions of course, or the one man argued on both sides, or
-whether the whole story be a fabrication, ’tis scarce worth while to
-inquire.
-
-I pass to more modern times. William Davy was made Serjeant-at-law in
-1754. His wit combats with Lord Mansfield are still remembered. His
-lordship was credited with a desire to sit on Good Friday; our Serjeant
-hinted that he would be the first judge that had done so since Pontius
-Pilate! Mansfield scouted one of Davy’s legal propositions. “If that be
-law I must burn all my books.” “Better read them first,” was the quiet
-retort. In recent days two of the best known Serjeants were Parry and
-Ballantine, the first a profound lawyer, the second a great advocate,
-but both are vanished from the scene.
-
-
-  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
-  London & Edinburgh
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-TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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-
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-
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-    standardized.
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